The Supreme Court will let two West Virginia residents revive a lawsuit against Bayer AG over its anti-cholesterol drug Baycol, which was withdrawn from the market in 2001 after reports of a severe and sometimes fatal muscle disorder.

The high court on Thursday unanimously agreed to let Kevin Smith and Shirley Sperlazza's class-action lawsuit against Bayer go forward.

The 8th U.S. Court of Appeals had thrown out their lawsuit out after a federal judge overseeing multistate litigation against Bayer refused to let other West Virginians file a similar class-action lawsuit against the corporation.

The high court said that decision was incorrect.

The Mississippi Supreme Court on Thursday overturned the conviction of Vanessa Decker, who was given a 4-year suspended sentence in 2008 on a charge of exploiting her own mother.

Last year, the state Court of Appeals upheld Decker's conviction.

Decker was convicted in Clay County of felony exploitation of a vulnerable adult for taking $4,120 from her mother's bank account between November 2005 and April 2007. She said she had permission.

The Supreme Court says a jury instruction given by the trial judge conflicted with Decker's indictment. The court said the failure of the judge to correct the mistake required the conviction to be overturned.

Decker had argued the law under which she was convicted was vague. The Supreme Court did not discuss that issue.

The Supreme Court has upheld the criminal conviction of an Alabama man even though the justices agreed the police search that produced incriminating evidence was illegal.

The high court's 7-2 ruling Thursday against Willie Gene Davis highlighted an unusual series of events. Between Davis' arrest and a federal appeals court ruling affirming his conviction, the Supreme Court put new limits on the ability of police to search a vehicle immediately after a suspect is arrested.

The question for the justices was whether to invoke the exclusionary rule that generally requires evidence to be suppressed if it results from a violation of a suspect's Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches. In this case, the court said, the good-faith efforts of the officers overrode that concern.

The Supreme Court says courts must consider age when examining whether a child is in custody and must be given Miranda rights.

The high court on Thursday ruled that police and school officials were wrong when they interviewed a 13-year-old special education student about a string of break-ins in Chapel Hill, N.C.

The interview took place in a closed room at his school. The boy was never read his Miranda rights, and his lawyer challenged the use of his confession.

The North Carolina Supreme Court refused to throw out the confession and said courts cannot look at age when examining whether the boy thought he could leave.

But the U.S. Supreme Court said in a 5-4 vote that courts have to consider how old the child was during the interrogation.

The man convicted of killing a 7-year-old girl who became the namesake of Megan's Laws across the country should be allowed to pursue claims that his lawyers were ineffective, a state appeals court ruled Tuesday.

But the appeals court did not agree with Jesse Timmendequas' argument that his kidnapping, sexual assault and murder conviction should be overturned and he should be released from prison.

Instead, the appeals court ordered a state judge to consider whether there's merit to Timmendequas' arguments about faulty representation.

Timmendequas was convicted in 1997 and given a death sentence with the provision that if the death sentence was vacated by a court, he would still serve consecutive life sentences for murder and first-degree kidnapping. The state Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the federal Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal.

The suspected leader of a Colombian cocaine cartel had planned to plead guilty Tuesday to a drug conspiracy charge, but opted at the last minute to go to trial instead because the deal prosecutors offered meant he would likely die in prison.

An exasperated U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz warned Jaime Alberto Marin-Zamora that the latest continuance in his case — the third — would be his last. She scheduled a trial for Sept. 26.

"That's the drop-dead date," Seitz told Marin-Zamora, who was clad in tan prison garb and was using earphones so he could hear an interpreter translate the judge's words to Spanish.

Defense lawyer David Fernandez told The Associated Press after the hearing that prosecutors offered a plea deal that would effectively mean a life sentence, which is the maximum Marin-Zamora faces if convicted of cocaine trafficking conspiracy at trial.

"We're not going to take a plea that would let him rot in jail for the rest of his life," Fernandez said. "We were looking for a number we could live with and my guy wouldn't die in jail."

Fernandez declined to discuss specific details of the negotiations.