Los Fresnos Justice of the Peace Gustavo Garza was sued by three families who say Garza left them with no real option when he told them they must pay a fine for their children's transgressions or paddle them in open court.

Until District Judge Abel Limas can resolve that case, he ordered Garza to halt the paddling. A trial date has not been set.

The lawsuit was initially brought by the parents of a 15-year-old Los Fresnos girl who appeared in Garza's court in April for skipping school.

Daniel Zurita paddled his stepdaughter with one of the two wooden paddles Garza displays in his courtroom after the justice said it was either that or pay a $500 fine.

Last week, Garza said offering paddling as an option was lawful and that 98 percent of parents took that choice.

Garza was represented by Cameron County attorney Richard Burst at a hearing Wednesday. A woman in the county attorney's office who did not identify herself declined comment and hung up.

A message left for Garza at his office was not immediately returned.

Plaintiff attorney Mark Rossi said Burst rejected his offer to stop the case if Garza would halt the paddling in his courtroom and apologize.

The unanimous decision came in the cases of Shawqi Omar, taken into custody in Iraq for allegedly assisting a terrorist network, and Mohammad Munaf, whose death sentence by an Iraqi court was recently overturned. Munaf has been accused in Iraq of setting up the 2005 kidnapping of three Romanian journalists.

Held by the U.S. military at Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport, both men are Sunni Muslims who say they will be tortured if turned over to the Iraqi government.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that U.S. courts are not allowed to intervene in an ongoing foreign criminal proceeding and "pass judgment on its legitimacy."

The justices ruled that basic protections do extend to American citizens held overseas by U.S. military operating as part of a multinational force. At the same time, however, the court said those protections provide Omar and Munaf with no legal relief.

The Bush administration argued that U.S. courts lack authority to review the claims of Munaf and Omar because they are held abroad by a multinational force, of which the United States is only a part.

Nations including Iraq have criminal jurisdiction over those within their borders, said the Justice Department solicitor general's office.

Arrested in 2004 by U.S. soldiers at his home in Baghdad, Omar was to have been transferred to Iraqi courts for trial, but a U.S. district court blocked the move.

In a case that is continuing, an Iraqi court recently reversed Munaf's death sentence.

A prominent Charleston law firm has filed suit against the company that produces Verizon's phone books, saying its ad was screwed up in the latest Charleston edition.

Richard Neely and Mike Callaghan filed the suit for Neely & Callaghan on June 10 in Kanawha Circuit Court.

The attorneys claim Idearc Media Corp. ran an incorrect ad for the firm. The ad mostly had copy for Neely & Hunter, Neely's former firm.

"What it does is paints our firm and us as individuals in a false light to the public," Callaghan said Wednesday. "If you look at what's in the book, the way it reads, it says Callaghan at top, but lists Hunter in the bottom. It puts me and our firm in a false light."

Neely is a former state Supreme Court justice and Yale Law School graduate, and Callaghan is a former Congressional candidate, former federal prosecutor, former state Secretary for the Environment and former chair of the state Democratic Party.

"Neely & Callaghan does not advertise in the greater Charleston area because the lawyers are well known," the attorneys claim in the suit. "The primary vehicle for connecting clients with Neely & Callaghan is the Yellow Pages of the telephone directory prepared by Defendant."

The suit says Neely and Roger Hunter's partnership ended in May 2007. Hunter now is with Spilman Thomas & Battle.

In November, according to the suit, Neely & Callaghan purchased an ad with Idearc. The correct version of the ad appeared in the Teays Valley edition of the Verizon phone book.

But the ad that ran in the Charleston edition was headlined Neely & Callaghan, but the ad included information about Neely and Hunter. That included misrepresenting services the new firm offers.

Neely & Callaghan's office manager asked to see a draft version of the ad, but was told that Idearc doesn't do that, according to the suit.

"Now, for an entire year, the staff of Neely & Callaghan must take calls for Roger D. Hunter and waste its time properly referring those calls to the correct firm," the attorneys claim in the suit.

The attorneys also say Idearc libeled the firm by filing a false statement to credit reporting agencies that they didn't pay for the ad when Idearc knew that it had breached its contract with them and no debt was owed.

The defendants "regular course of conduct is to extort money from wronged customers after [it] has breached its contract by threatening to refuse to publish further advertisements in its quasi-monopoly telephone directories if wronged customers fail to pay charges for contracts that were nonetheless breached," the suit states.

The lawsuit seeks a maximum of $75,000 in compensatory and punitive damages as well as court costs and interest.

"We will be quantifying damages, yes," Callaghan said. "Some are unquantifiable in respect to reputation. There's not a formula to say how much. But yes, we will be looking at those numbers.

"We are looking at our phone call volume to determine how much it's gone down. We are looking to see who has trouble getting a hold of us. It's me in particular. But it says we do work that we don't do. We're a top-shelf litigation firm. We defend people and sue people. It paints us falsely as saying we do things like structured business buyouts and securities.

"I hate that we had to file the suit, but that's life."

With office for Idearc located in the same building as his law firm, Callaghan said it has been awkward at times.

"We like them, and we get along with them fine," he said. "They messed up, and we asked them to help out. And now we're here where we are."

Anton Geiser's work as a guard meets the type of persecutory conduct banned under a 1953 federal law, the ruling said.

Geiser, 83, did not reveal his Nazi ties on his visa application, but he is not accused of lying about them. Files from the period have been lost and it is not clear what questions he was asked.

His lawyer, Adrian N. Roe, told the appeals court this year that guards not deemed war criminals were sometimes allowed in by the State Department. He complained that the Justice Department, in its efforts to expel former Nazis, was revisiting decisions made a half-century ago.

But the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which focused on the language of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, said Geiser should have his U.S. citizenship revoked and be deported.

Wharton Aldhizer and Weaver, a Harrisonburg-based law firm, won the award for most food collected in the Blue Ridge region "Legal Food Frenzy," a food drive competition among the state's legal community.

Wharton Aldhizer and Weaver donated 25,338 pounds of food, 31 percent of all of the food donated to the food bank in this region.

Statewide, law firms gathered more than 1.36 million pounds of food for state food banks, enough for more than 1 million meals. This amount doubles last year's total of almost 679,000 pounds raised, and surpasses this year's goal of 1 million pounds.

More than 180 law firms participated in seven regions. The Blue Ridge region is served by the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, which includes Rockingham, Page, Shenandoah and Augusta counties.

The justices have twice struck down the award to the family of a longtime smoker of Marlboros, made by Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA.

Oregon courts have repeatedly upheld the judgment. The most recent ruling, in January, followed a high court decision last year that said jurors may punish a defendant only for harm done to someone who is suing, not other smokers who could make similar claims.

The justices will consider only whether the Oregon Supreme Court in essence ignored the U.S. high court's ruling, not whether the amount of the judgment is constitutionally permissible.