A state court security officer on Friday admitted taking cash payments from bail bondsmen, the latest development in a continuing investigation of the Connecticut bail bond industry.

Jill D'Antona, a judicial marshal employed at the Superior Court on Elm Street in New Haven, pleaded guilty in federal court to soliciting and accepting a gratuity. In her position, which her superiors said she is in the process of resigning, D'Antona, 37, of Seymour, was assigned to courthouse security and prisoner transportation duties.

D'Antona is accused of taking thousands of dollars over at least five years from Robert and Philip Jacobs, two of the three principals in a family-owned bail bond business operating in greater New Haven. The Jacobses, who were charged earlier in connection with the same investigation, have admitted paying D'Antona for using her official position to get them business.

China keeps secret the number of prisoners it executes, but international human rights observers have no doubt it judicially kills more than any other country -- with estimates of executions somewhere between 1,000 and 12,000 a year in recent times.

But from the start of 2007, China's Supreme People's Court took back power of final approval on death penalties, relinquished to provincial high courts in the 1980s, and promised to apply the ultimate punishment more carefully.

In a rare glimpse into how the new rule is working, the president of the top court's criminal law chamber, Huang Ermei, said that in 2007 it rejected 15 percent of death sentences passed by lower courts, according to the China News Service on Saturday. She gave no hint of the overall number of executions.

Sandlin, 56, of Sherman, Texas, was released without bail after his arraignment in U.S. District Court in Tucson. He and his lawyer declined to comment.

Renzi pleaded not guilty to the charges on Tuesday. Both are due back in court April 29.

The indictment accuses Renzi of telling groups seeking to get the surface rights to an Arizona copper deposit that they would have to buy land owned by Sandlin to win required congressional approval for the land exchange.

After an investment group agreed to buy the land, Renzi received $733,000 from Sandlin, the indictment said. Sandlin had owed Renzi money from a previous land deal.

Renzi and another co-defendant are also charged with eight other counts.

Renzi will stay in office, his lawyer Reid Weingarten said. Renzi, a three-term Republican whose 1st Congressional District covers most of northeastern Arizona, announced last year that he would not seek re-election.

The group asked the judge on Thursday to demand an explanation regarding alleged inconsistencies between testimony at a congressional hearing last week and what the White House told a federal court in January.

"This evidence demonstrates defendants' blatant disregard for the truth and the processes of this court," Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy in court papers.

CREW wants the judge to compel the Executive Office of the President to explain why it should not be held in contempt of court.

In a sworn declaration, White House official Theresa Payton told the court on Jan. 16 that "substantially all" e-mails from 2003 to 2005 should be contained on back-up computer tapes.

However, at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Feb. 26, the panel's Democrats released a White House document that called that claim into question.

E-mail was missing from a White House archive for the period of Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 2003 from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, the White House document states. The backup tape covering that seven-day period was not created until Oct. 21, 2003, raising the possibility that e-mail was missing from the earlier period. That time span was in the earliest days of the Justice Department's probe into whether anyone at the White House leaked the CIA identity of Valerie Plame. Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was eventually convicted by a jury of four felonies in the leak probe.

The congressional panel also released written statements by a former White House technical supervisor saying that a 15-person team conducted an extensive multi-phase assessment that resulted in a final 250-page analysis on the problem of missing White House e-mail.

In her sworn declaration to the federal court in January, the White House official said she was aware of a chart created by a former employee regarding missing e-mails, but said nothing about the 250-page analysis.

The immediate impact of the ruling was not clear. Attorneys for the state Department of Education were reviewing the ruling, and home schooling organizations were lining up against it.

"Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey wrote in a Feb. 28 opinion for the 2nd District Court of Appeal.

Noncompliance could lead to criminal complaints against the parents, Croskey said.

An estimated 166,000 students in California are home schooled, but it was not known how many of them are taught solely by an uncredentialed parent.

To earn a five-year preliminary teaching credential in California, a person must obtain a bachelor's degree and complete multiple examinations.

Until now, California allowed home schooling if parents filed paperwork to establish themselves as small, private schools; hired a credentialed tutor; or enrolled their child in an independent study program run by an established school while teaching the child at home.

The ruling stems from a case involving a Los Angeles-area couple whose eldest child reported "physical and emotional mistreatment" by the father, court papers said.

The father, Phillip Long, vowed to take the case to the state Supreme Court.

"I have sincerely held religious beliefs," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Public schools conflict with that. I have to go with what my conscience requires me."

They did not identify the people or companies concerned, but they said "the background is the number that has been rising for years of criminal complaints by the holders of patent rights in the run-up to CeBIT."

Police said they filled 68 boxes with gadgets, documents and advertising material. The gadgets included cell phones, navigation devices, electronic picture frames and flat-screen devices, a police statement said.

All the exhibitors who were searched cooperated, except one who was briefly taken to a police station, police said. Of 51 exhibitors affected, 24 were from mainland China, three from Hong Kong and 12 from Taiwan. Another nine were German, and one each were from Poland, the Netherlands and Korea.

The alleged patent violations largely concerned devices with MP3, MP4 or digital video broadcast functions, as well as DVD players and blank CDs and DVDs, police said.