Irving Picard, the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of Bernard Madoff’s investment firm, spent $26.9 million in the six months ended Sept. 30 while recovering $849,000 for victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, according to a report filed in Manhattan federal court.

Picard has recovered a total of about $1.5 billion for creditors of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, he said in a filing with U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Burton Lifland made public Oct. 30. The trustee said he evaluated 14,030 investor claims as of Oct. 22 and approved 2,280. He has committed to paying $738 million on behalf of the Securities Investor Protection Corp., which is obligated to compensate cheated investors as much as $500,000 on most claims, according to the report.

The largest component of the expenses for the half-year period is $15.8 million in legal fees to Picard’s firm, Baker & Hostetler LLP. Most of the money recovered in the six-month period, $771,000, came from Madoff investors who received preferences, or payments, in the 90 days before the bankruptcy filing, according to Picard’s report.

A Des Moines Register poll shows more than one-third of voters want to remove three Iowa Supreme Court justices who joined a unanimous ruling that legalized gay marriage.

The poll published Sunday found that 37 percent of likely voters intend to vote to remove all three justices and 34 percent say they will vote to retain all the judges. Another 10 percent plan to retain only some justices, 11 percent don't intend on vote on the judges and 8 percent aren't sure how they'll vote.

If Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and justices David Baker and Michael Streit lose retention votes, it will be the first time voters removed an Iowa Supreme Court justice.

Authorities say 21-year-old Ryan Sullivan, of Derry, N.H., is scheduled to be arraigned Monday in Salem, N.H. District Court as a fugitive from justice.

Sullivan is wanted in connection with the Friday stabbing of 22-year-old Randall Rawson. Rawson was stabbed in the neck in Haverhill, Mass. at about 10 p.m. on Friday and died at a Boston hospital on Saturday.

Sullivan was arrested Saturday at a rest area on Interstate 93. Once extradited to Massachusetts, he faces a murder charge.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is apologizing for the 50,000 recorded telephone calls made to Nevada voters in which she supports a ballot measure to change the way state judges are selected.

O'Connor said Wednesday that she did not authorize the use of her recorded statement in the robo calls, which awakened many Nevadans after midnight Monday. The calls were supposed to be made midday.

But O'Connor said that, whatever the time, her voice should not have been used at all.

"I did not authorize the use of my recorded statement as part of automated telephone calls to Nevada residents, and I regret that the statement was used in this way," she said in a statement issued through the Supreme Court.

At the same time, she defended her involvement in the campaign to amend the state constitution to reduce the role of elections in the choice of judges. O'Connor has appeared in a television commercial on behalf of the Question 1 measure that Nevadans will vote on on Tuesday.

Some critics have said O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, should refrain from political activity because she continues to hear cases as a federal judge. On Tuesday, she was in the majority on a panel of federal appeals court judges that struck down a key part of an Arizona law requiring voters to prove they are citizens before registering to vote.

O'Connor, 80, has traveled the country to criticize costly election campaigns for judges. She has said judicial elections erode confidence in an impartial judiciary and feed the perception that justice is for sale.

Since her retirement in 2006, O'Connor has been active on other issues as well, including calling for enhanced civics education for schoolchildren and advocating for Alzheimer's research. Her husband, John, died last year of complications arising from Alzheimer's disease.

The U.S. Supreme Court has for now cleared the way for states to use foreign sources in obtaining a lethal injection drug used in carrying out the death penalty.

Although the Supreme Court has upheld death by lethal injection, the regimen it has approved includes injection with a dose of sodium thiopental that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration to render the prisoner unconscious so he does not feel pain. In recent months, Hospira Inc., the only U.S. manufacturer of the drug, has been unable to meet demand, citing unspecified problems with its raw material suppliers. The shortage has left death penalty states scrambling to find alternatives.

Enter Arizona and the case of Jeffrey Landrigan. Landrigan's lawyers sought to block his execution because state officials would not say where they were getting the drug for the execution, and defense lawyers contended that there was no way to evaluate the safety of the drug without knowing where it came from. Pressed by a federal judge, the state admitted it was using a drug from a foreign country, but wouldn't specify which one.

The highest court in Massachusetts has rejected an appeal by a former high school student who was convicted of planning a Columbine-style attack at his high school in Marshfield.

Joseph Nee was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and served nine months in prison.

Nee appealed his conviction based on the legal defense of “renunciation,” arguing that he had abandoned the plan by a group of teens in 2004 to blow up Marshfield High School and shoot everyone on a hit list of students, teachers and emergency workers.

In its ruling yesterday, the Supreme Judicial Court said Nee was not entitled to a renunciation defense because he did not acknowledge that he conspired with other students to commit a crime.

The court said Nee failed to reveal and renounce his own crime.