Lawyers for defendant Brian Nichols said in court papers earlier this week that Superior Court Judge James Bodiford was quoted in a newspaper article four days after the March 11, 2005, shootings saying that he was friends with the judge killed in the rampage.

The article also said Bodiford released a statement at the time that described the death of Judge Rowland Barnes as a "brutal murder."

Nichols' lawyers questioned Bodiford's ability to be impartial, and asked that he step down.

Bodiford said at a hearing Thursday that he doesn't believe he should step down. But he said it's a good idea to let another judge review the issue.

Bodiford is serving on the Nichols case in place of a previous judge who stepped down from the case in late January after he was quoted in a magazine article saying of Nichols that "everyone in the world knows he did it."

Nichols' murder trial for the killings of four people resumes July 10.

James Battista told a judge in federal court in Brooklyn he hatched a scheme in late 2006 with another old friend of Donaghy, Thomas Martino, to pay the referee thousands of dollars for the information while Battista was "engaged in the business of sports betting."

Battista's lawyer had notified the court last week that his client wanted to go to trial rather than plead guilty to charges of defrauding the NBA, as Martino did earlier this month. But he changed his mind after prosecutors offered a last-minute deal allowing him to instead plead guilty to a lesser charge of conspiring to make illegal bets, said the lawyer, Jack McMahon.

"He's a gambler, and he bet," McMahon said. "We never really contested that."

The deal spares Donaghy from having to testify as the government's star witness at a high-profile federal trial. It also means Battista, 42, will face only 10 to 16 months in prison at sentencing on July 11. By contrast, Martino faces 12 to 18 months.

Donaghy, of Bradenton, Fla., pleaded guilty last year to charges he conspired to engage in wire fraud and transmitted betting information through interstate commerce.

The referee said he made NBA bets for four years, even wagering on games he worked. He also admitted recommending bets to high-stakes gamblers and collecting $5,000 if his picks hit.

Donaghy, 41, is scheduled to be sentenced May 22. By law, he faces up to 25 years in prison, though the term could be much lower under sentencing guidelines.

The three men attended high school together in Springfield, Pa

The South San Francisco-based biotechnology company was ordered to pay $500 million to a Southern California hospital for failing to pay royalties after City of Hope Medical Center helped manufacture some of its drugs.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court jury had awarded the hospital $300 million in actual damages and another $200 million in punitive damages for violating a contract signed in 1976.

The state's high court on Wednesday knocked out the $200 million in punitive damages but upheld the $300 million.

The closely watched case attracted 17 friends-of-the-court briefs from a variety of business interests.

It is not necessarily unlawful for an employer to adopt policies that put older workers at a disadvantage. Such policies pass muster under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act as long as they are based on “reasonable factors other than age.”

The question in a Supreme Court argument on Wednesday was whether the employer has to prove that such “reasonable factors” exist, or whether it is up to the employee who has brought a lawsuit to show that they do not.

The burden of proof makes a substantial difference in any lawsuit, although statutes rarely specify which side bears it. For federal laws against race and sex discrimination in the workplace, the Supreme Court has filled the gap by developing fairly elaborate procedures that plaintiffs and defendants must follow. But for age discrimination, the rules have remained murky, leaving the lower courts in confusion over how to handle this rapidly growing category of workplace discrimination claims.

The argument the justices heard on Wednesday was in a case brought by two dozen workers at a federal research laboratory in upstate New York. Carrying out a reduction in force, the employer, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, which is owned by the Lockheed Martin Corporation, terminated 31 employees after using a set of guidelines to evaluate workers’ skills and amenability to retraining. All but one dismissed employee was over 40, the age at which the protections of the federal age discrimination law begin to apply.

Most of the affected employees joined a lawsuit arguing that there was no justification for using an evaluation system that had such a starkly disparate impact on older workers, and that the procedure consequently violated the federal law. The plaintiffs won in a jury trial. But the judgment was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, which held that plaintiffs in such a case had the burden of showing that the policy they were challenging was unreasonable.

The unanimous decision comes in a case from Portsmouth, Va., where city detectives seized crack cocaine from a motorist after arresting him for a traffic ticket offense.

David Lee Moore was pulled over for driving on a suspended license. The violation is a minor crime in Virginia and calls for police to issue a court summons and let the driver go.

Instead, city detectives arrested Moore and prosecutors say that drugs taken from him in a subsequent search can be used against him as evidence.

"We reaffirm against a novel challenge what we have signaled for half a century," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.

Scalia said that when officers have probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest and to search the suspect in order to safeguard evidence and ensure their own safety.

Moore was convicted on a drug charge and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that police should have released Moore and could not lawfully conduct a search.

State law, said the Virginia Supreme Court, restricted officers to issuing a ticket in exchange for a promise to appear later in court. Virginia courts dismissed the indictment against Moore.

Moore argued that the Fourth Amendment permits a search only following a lawful state arrest.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she finds more support for Moore's position in previous court cases than the rest of the court does. But she said she agrees that the arrest and search of Moore was constitutional, even though it violated Virginia law.

The Bush administration and attorneys general from 18 states lined up in support of Virginia prosecutors.

The federal government said Moore's case had the potential to greatly increase the class of unconstitutional arrests, resulting in evidence seized during searches being excluded with increasing frequency.

Looking to state laws to provide the basis for searches would introduce uncertainty into the legal system, the 18 states said in court papers.