China plans to gradually lessen the number of executions it carries out while still keeping the death penalty, according to a statement released Sunday by China's Supreme People's Court, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Public Security, and China's lead prosecutor. The statement indicated that China cannot entirely abolish the death penalty, but noted that if the possibility exists that a convicted individual did not commit the crime, then that person should not be executed. The legal groups also condemned confessions through torture and said police must instead gather evidence according to the law.

China, which executes more prisoners than any other country in the world, revised its death penalty laws last year, mandating the Supreme People's Court to review any death sentences handed down. The country has been under pressure to take a closer look at its policies after China's deputy chief prosecutor revealed that almost every wrongful conviction in recent years has been the result of torture and intensive interrogation techniques.

A 60-year-old bookkeeper who embezzled more than $1 million from a small, family-owned law firm in downtown Cincinnati will spend the next six years in prison.

Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Charles J. Kubicki Jr. ordered the sentence this morning for Candace Vail, who pleaded guilty last month to a charge of theft. Kubicki also ordered Vail to re-pay the $1,038,499 she stole from from Goodman & Goodman between Jan. 1, 2001, and Feb. 16, 2006.

Vail’s excuse in a letter to the court? She wasn’t paid enough and often did errands for the attorneys she worked for without extra compensation.

Vail used the money to bankroll her son's landscaping business, according to Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Andy Berghausen.

Court records show Vail filed for bankruptcy last October.

Vail took client checks to Goodman & Goodman from the mail, deposited them into little-used firm accounts and then wrote 1,325 checks to herself and her family. She forged attorney names on another 91 checks she wrote to herself, according to court records.

She even duped the Ohio Supreme Court, which began investigating shortly before she was caught. When the firm's trust account, which by law must be kept by law firms, was overdrawn, the bank alerted the Ohio Supreme Court.

Vail intercepted letters notifying the attorneys about the investigation, forged attorney signatures on documents and told Ohio Supreme Court officials they should deal with her. That investigation has been resolved since the theft was discovered, Goodman said.

The firm realized money was missing on March 8 when one of the firm's attorneys went to the bank himself and discovered several bounced checks. Vail was immediately fired, Goodman said.

Although the government generally respected and promoted human rights at the national level by investigating, prosecuting, and sentencing public officials and members of the security forces, a deeply entrenched culture of impunity and corruption persisted, particularly at the state and local level. The following human rights problems were reported: unlawful killings by security forces; kidnappings, including by police; torture; poor and overcrowded prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention; corruption, inefficiency, and lack of transparency in the judicial system; statements coerced through torture permitted as evidence in trials; criminal intimidation of journalists, leading to self-censorship; corruption at all levels of government; domestic violence against women often perpetrated with impunity; criminal violence, including killings against women; trafficking in persons, sometimes allegedly with official involvement; social and economic discrimination against indigenous people; and child labor.

On Friday, Calderon said he plans to replace each state's individual criminal code with a single, nationwide code. He also wants to make it easier to fire corrupt police officers and to transition to trials similar to those in the US. Trials are currently held behind closed doors.

Thousands of Italians rallied in Rome on Saturday in support of a bill that would give legal status to unmarried gay and heterosexual couples couples. The proposal, which has been harshly criticized by the Italian justice minister and the top Italian bishop, would give unmarried couples combined medical insurance, the right to visit their partner in prisons or hospitals, inheritance rights, and decision-making authority should one partner become sick. Couples would have to live together for nine years before they would be entitled to property rights, but if the legislation is passed, couples would be able to take advantage of the other legal protections immediately.

The Vatican has said that giving unmarried couples rights would threaten traditional families. A "traditional" family is held by the Vatican to be a marital union between a man and a woman.

A revised version of a controversial bill granting amnesty to groups that allegedly committed war crimes was signed into law Saturday by Afghan President Hamid Karzai after being approved earlier in the day by the Afghan parliament, which includes many former militia leaders. The resolution bars the state from independently prosecuting individuals for war crimes absent accusation from an alleged victim. It also extends immunity to all groups involved in pre-2002 conflicts, as opposed to only leaders of various factions alleged to have committed war crimes during the 1980s resistance against Soviet forces and war crimes committed during the country's civil war. The Taliban and other human rights violators active before the establishment of the December 2001 Interim Administration in Afghanistan are protected under the bill. Critics say the law may violate Afghanistan's constitution as well as certain international human rights treaties. MPs opposing the bill reportedly were threatened by former militiamen in the national assembly.

Both houses of the Afghan parliament initially approved a resolution calling for amnesty for leaders in February. That resolution drew some popular support but was criticized by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and other rights advocates. Afghanistan's highest body of Islamic clerics also opposed the issuance of a blanket amnesty, arguing that the perpetrators of war crimes can only gain forgiveness from the victims and not the parliament.

The media recently has been writing the obituary of the tort lawyers. "The power of the plaintiffs bar is on the wane," argued the American Lawyer; a cover story in Business Week promised to reveal "How Business Trounced the Trial Lawyers." With apologies to Mark Twain, the reports of the trial lawyers' demise are greatly exaggerated.

While asbestos and tobacco litigation bonanzas are winding down, America's most aggressive contingency-fee law firms still have in place a fee structure in search of an investment strategy. And so, faced with shrinking domestic opportunities, these firms have gone global.

Consider one class-action lawsuit, in which a plaintiffs firm sued Deutsche Bank on behalf of an African tribe which suffered atrocities committed by imperial Germany in the 19th century. Or another, consolidating 10 complaints filed around the country on behalf of all South Africans injured by the former apartheid regime from 1948 to the present.

One of the South African complaints was on behalf of a class including 32,000 plaintiffs; the class in another was estimated to encompass "millions of individuals." The defendants, almost 100 multinational corporations that did business in South Africa after 1948, were alleged to be liable for injuries on the theory that they had aided and abetted the apartheid regime. Purported damages in just one of the consolidated actions total $400 billion.

The law used to lodge these massive foreign class actions in the U.S. is the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). This obscure piece of legislation adopted in 1789 gave federal district courts jurisdiction in civil cases brought by an alien for a tort committed in violation of the law of nations, or of a U.S. treaty. The law was passed primarily to assure a hearing for cases involving offenses against foreign ambassadors, violations of safe conduct and piracy.

The ATS was virtually dormant for two centuries. Then relatives of a Paraguayan citizen who had been kidnapped and tortured to death by a Paraguayan police official—on Paraguayan soil—brought a civil suit against the police official. Plaintiffs and defendants happened to be in the U.S., the police official illegally. In 1980 a U.S. court of appeals allowed the suit to go forward under the ATS, on the grounds that the police official violated international law, including various U.N provisions. From that acorn a mighty oak has grown.

Even by American standards the size of recent ATS class actions is extraordinary. Cases involving wholly foreign events routinely consist of tens or hundreds of thousands of "John Doe" plaintiffs who reside in remote locations as distant as Sudan and Pakistan. The size of the class of defendants has also grown to 500 or more deep-pocketed individuals or companies.

The fact that these lawsuits appear in U.S. courts at all defies common sense. Imagine our justifiable indignation if courts in Japan, France or Russia determined they had jurisdiction over alleged wrongdoing by Americans, in America, against other Americans. It takes a thoroughly arrogant view of the world—call it legal imperialism—to presume that our courts should be the arbiter of problems everywhere, whether or not the problem had anything whatsoever to do with the U.S.

Nevertheless, our tort lawyers presume just that, demanding that our court system sit in judgment over alleged conduct occurring completely within the borders of other sovereign nations, regardless of the effect this may have on U.S. foreign relations. Huge ATS cases have been filed against classes of unnamed defendants in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and other countries in the Middle East where vital, and delicate, U.S. national security interests are at stake.

Of course, it ultimately will be impractical for U.S. courts to police these monster ATS class actions if they are allowed to proliferate; they dwarf in size the asbestos cases that currently plague the U.S. courts. Congress could have amended the ATS to limit the damage, and in 2005, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein proposed to do so, without success.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court weighed in. In Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, a Mexican doctor suspected to have participated in the torture and murder of a U.S. DEA agent was apprehended in Mexico by Jose Sosa, a Mexican national hired by U.S. law enforcement. Mr. Sosa brought the Mexican doctor to the U.S., where he was arrested. The doctor sued Mr. Sosa for unlawful detention. In 2004, the Supreme Court dismissed the action and imposed a "high bar" against innovative ATS lawsuits. As a result of Sosa, several ATS suits have been rejected because of the potential for interference with U.S. foreign policy.

In one case, the D.C. circuit dismissed an ATS case seeking reparations from Japan for crimes committed during World War II because the suit interfered with state-to-state negotiations and threatened to "disrupt Japan's delicate relations with China and Korea, thereby creating serious implications for stability in the region."

In another, a federal court dismissed a case brought after the Israeli Defense Forces used heavy equipment to demolish buildings in the Palestinian territory. Plaintiffs sought damages from the manufacturer, Caterpillar, along with an order to stop supplying products to the Israeli armed forces. The court noted that the plaintiffs improperly sought to challenge the acts of an existing government in a region "where diplomacy is delicate and U.S. interests are great."

Trial lawyers nevertheless continue to test the outer limits of ATS liability, "high bar" or not, by filing an array of increasingly ambitious ATS class actions. In one pending case, Wal-Mart has been sued on behalf of residents of China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Swaziland and Nicaragua. Plaintiffs seek to hold the company vicariously liable for the labor policies of its overseas suppliers. The improvement of labor policies in other countries is certainly a worthy goal. But it is the province of the executive branch and Congress under the foreign affairs and treaty-making powers, not that of attorneys looking for contingency fees.

The corporations named in the South African case—including IBM, General Motors, Ford, Xerox, Coca-Cola and Citigroup—were legally doing business in South Africa pursuant to the official U.S. policy of "constructive engagement" that sought to encourage positive changes in South Africa through economic investment. Recognizing this, the federal court in the Southern District of New York dismissed all 10 of the cases.

That dismissal, along with the dismissals of several other ATS cases, is now pending on appeal before the Second and Ninth Circuits. As these and other ATS cases ripen for appellate review, the era of post-Sosa ATS jurisprudence is entering a critical phase.

The executive branch has promoted strict conformance with Sosa: Both the Clinton and Bush administrations have filed progressively stronger "Statement of Interest" briefs urging that federal courts dismiss ATS cases that could interfere with U.S. foreign policy.

Still, leading class-action law firms such as Motley Rice, Milberg Weiss and Cohen Milstein have launched exploratory ATS cases to test the waters, trying to maneuver around sovereign immunity, which prevents lawsuits against foreign governments. Instead, the plaintiffs lawyers claim that U.S. corporations doing business abroad are vicariously liable for the purely overseas acts of foreign governments, or other actors, in jurisdictions where the U.S. companies do business. And pressured by the massive exposure involved in ATS class actions, defendants in some early cases have opted to settle rather than undertake the risks of litigation.

These plaintiffs firms are flush with cash, experts in the business of creating cases, and undeterred by setbacks. In fact, contingency-fee lawyers take each rejection as a lesson in which tactics work and which do not. They know that if they can weather dismissal motions in a single case, they can proliferate a succession of copycat ATS class actions.

Once they do, you can be sure that a torrent of global ATS class actions will follow—to the detriment of the U.S. court system, foreign policy and U.S. standing around the world.

The media recently has been writing the obituary of the tort lawyers. "The power of the plaintiffs bar is on the wane," argued the American Lawyer; a cover story in Business Week promised to reveal "How Business Trounced the Trial Lawyers." With apologies to Mark Twain, the reports of the trial lawyers' demise are greatly exaggerated.

While asbestos and tobacco litigation bonanzas are winding down, America's most aggressive contingency-fee law firms still have in place a fee structure in search of an investment strategy. And so, faced with shrinking domestic opportunities, these firms have gone global.

Consider one class-action lawsuit, in which a plaintiffs firm sued Deutsche Bank on behalf of an African tribe which suffered atrocities committed by imperial Germany in the 19th century. Or another, consolidating 10 complaints filed around the country on behalf of all South Africans injured by the former apartheid regime from 1948 to the present.

One of the South African complaints was on behalf of a class including 32,000 plaintiffs; the class in another was estimated to encompass "millions of individuals." The defendants, almost 100 multinational corporations that did business in South Africa after 1948, were alleged to be liable for injuries on the theory that they had aided and abetted the apartheid regime. Purported damages in just one of the consolidated actions total $400 billion.

The law used to lodge these massive foreign class actions in the U.S. is the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). This obscure piece of legislation adopted in 1789 gave federal district courts jurisdiction in civil cases brought by an alien for a tort committed in violation of the law of nations, or of a U.S. treaty. The law was passed primarily to assure a hearing for cases involving offenses against foreign ambassadors, violations of safe conduct and piracy.

The ATS was virtually dormant for two centuries. Then relatives of a Paraguayan citizen who had been kidnapped and tortured to death by a Paraguayan police official—on Paraguayan soil—brought a civil suit against the police official. Plaintiffs and defendants happened to be in the U.S., the police official illegally. In 1980 a U.S. court of appeals allowed the suit to go forward under the ATS, on the grounds that the police official violated international law, including various U.N provisions. From that acorn a mighty oak has grown.

Even by American standards the size of recent ATS class actions is extraordinary. Cases involving wholly foreign events routinely consist of tens or hundreds of thousands of "John Doe" plaintiffs who reside in remote locations as distant as Sudan and Pakistan. The size of the class of defendants has also grown to 500 or more deep-pocketed individuals or companies.

The fact that these lawsuits appear in U.S. courts at all defies common sense. Imagine our justifiable indignation if courts in Japan, France or Russia determined they had jurisdiction over alleged wrongdoing by Americans, in America, against other Americans. It takes a thoroughly arrogant view of the world—call it legal imperialism—to presume that our courts should be the arbiter of problems everywhere, whether or not the problem had anything whatsoever to do with the U.S.

Nevertheless, our tort lawyers presume just that, demanding that our court system sit in judgment over alleged conduct occurring completely within the borders of other sovereign nations, regardless of the effect this may have on U.S. foreign relations. Huge ATS cases have been filed against classes of unnamed defendants in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and other countries in the Middle East where vital, and delicate, U.S. national security interests are at stake.

Of course, it ultimately will be impractical for U.S. courts to police these monster ATS class actions if they are allowed to proliferate; they dwarf in size the asbestos cases that currently plague the U.S. courts. Congress could have amended the ATS to limit the damage, and in 2005, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein proposed to do so, without success.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court weighed in. In Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, a Mexican doctor suspected to have participated in the torture and murder of a U.S. DEA agent was apprehended in Mexico by Jose Sosa, a Mexican national hired by U.S. law enforcement. Mr. Sosa brought the Mexican doctor to the U.S., where he was arrested. The doctor sued Mr. Sosa for unlawful detention. In 2004, the Supreme Court dismissed the action and imposed a "high bar" against innovative ATS lawsuits. As a result of Sosa, several ATS suits have been rejected because of the potential for interference with U.S. foreign policy.

In one case, the D.C. circuit dismissed an ATS case seeking reparations from Japan for crimes committed during World War II because the suit interfered with state-to-state negotiations and threatened to "disrupt Japan's delicate relations with China and Korea, thereby creating serious implications for stability in the region."

In another, a federal court dismissed a case brought after the Israeli Defense Forces used heavy equipment to demolish buildings in the Palestinian territory. Plaintiffs sought damages from the manufacturer, Caterpillar, along with an order to stop supplying products to the Israeli armed forces. The court noted that the plaintiffs improperly sought to challenge the acts of an existing government in a region "where diplomacy is delicate and U.S. interests are great."

Trial lawyers nevertheless continue to test the outer limits of ATS liability, "high bar" or not, by filing an array of increasingly ambitious ATS class actions. In one pending case, Wal-Mart has been sued on behalf of residents of China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Swaziland and Nicaragua. Plaintiffs seek to hold the company vicariously liable for the labor policies of its overseas suppliers. The improvement of labor policies in other countries is certainly a worthy goal. But it is the province of the executive branch and Congress under the foreign affairs and treaty-making powers, not that of attorneys looking for contingency fees.

The corporations named in the South African case—including IBM, General Motors, Ford, Xerox, Coca-Cola and Citigroup—were legally doing business in South Africa pursuant to the official U.S. policy of "constructive engagement" that sought to encourage positive changes in South Africa through economic investment. Recognizing this, the federal court in the Southern District of New York dismissed all 10 of the cases.

That dismissal, along with the dismissals of several other ATS cases, is now pending on appeal before the Second and Ninth Circuits. As these and other ATS cases ripen for appellate review, the era of post-Sosa ATS jurisprudence is entering a critical phase.

The executive branch has promoted strict conformance with Sosa: Both the Clinton and Bush administrations have filed progressively stronger "Statement of Interest" briefs urging that federal courts dismiss ATS cases that could interfere with U.S. foreign policy.

Still, leading class-action law firms such as Motley Rice, Milberg Weiss and Cohen Milstein have launched exploratory ATS cases to test the waters, trying to maneuver around sovereign immunity, which prevents lawsuits against foreign governments. Instead, the plaintiffs lawyers claim that U.S. corporations doing business abroad are vicariously liable for the purely overseas acts of foreign governments, or other actors, in jurisdictions where the U.S. companies do business. And pressured by the massive exposure involved in ATS class actions, defendants in some early cases have opted to settle rather than undertake the risks of litigation.

These plaintiffs firms are flush with cash, experts in the business of creating cases, and undeterred by setbacks. In fact, contingency-fee lawyers take each rejection as a lesson in which tactics work and which do not. They know that if they can weather dismissal motions in a single case, they can proliferate a succession of copycat ATS class actions.

Once they do, you can be sure that a torrent of global ATS class actions will follow -to the detriment of the U.S. court system, foreign policy and U.S. standing around the world.