When Esther Elizabeth Reed was indicted last year, Brooke Henson's relatives said they hoped Reed could tell authorities where to find her.

"Of course at first, it was just giving us hope that Brooke was alive," Lisa Henson, Brooke's aunt, said Monday.

Investigators have since said they don't think Reed had anything to do with Henson's 1999 disappearance.

Reed is accused of stealing Henson's identity in 2003 and posing as her to obtain false identification documents, take a high school equivalency test and get into Columbia University.

She was indicted last year and made her first court appearance Monday on federal charges of identity theft, mail and wire fraud and obtaining false identification documents. If convicted on all four charges, Reed faces a possible $1 million fine and 47 years in prison, time Lisa Henson said she hopes Reed will serve.

"I just hope that she never gets to see the light of day again," she said.

Reed answered routine questions from U.S. Magistrate Judge William M. Catoe and showed no emotion during the brief proceedings. Catoe entered a not guilty plea to all charges.

Reed, who was arrested Feb. 3 outside Chicago, is 29; Brooke Henson would be 29 in April.

Reed began posing as Henson in October 2003, obtaining an ID card in Ohio using her name, date of birth and Social Security number, Assistant U.S. Attorney Walt Wilkins said.

Two months later, Reed took a high school equivalency test in Ohio using Henson's name and received a degree, Wilkins said. Again using Henson's information, she took a college entrance exam in California in May 2004, using her score to apply for admission to Columbia, the prosecutor said.

Reed attended the New York school for two years, beginning in August 2004, Wilkins said. She then applied for and received student loans in Henson's name, in amounts investigators have said exceeded $100,000.

Reed then applied to the state of South Carolina for a duplicate copy of Henson's birth certificate, which she received at an address in Massachusetts. In 2006, Reed also applied for a U.S. passport in Henson's name, Wilkins said.

Investigators have said Reed stole multiple people's identities and also was admitted to Harvard and California State University, Fullerton, though she has not been charged in those cases and Wilkins did not discuss them Monday.

Assistant Federal Defender Lora Collins, who was appointed Monday to represent Reed but did not appear with her in court, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

A message left at Columbia University's public affairs office after business hours Monday was not immediately returned.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York last year upheld their convictions on charges of securities fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and bank fraud.

Lawyers for the two men argued that fraud charges should be thrown out because accounting terms were not explained to the jury and because the Rigases properly followed accounting rules during transactions that the government said were fraudulent.

Federal investigators began looking at Adelphia after it said in a footnote to a press release in 2002 that the company had approximately $2.2 billion in liabilities not previously reported on its balance sheet.

At trial, prosecutors said the Rigas family used the business for personal expenses, withdrawing millions of dollars to finance everything from 100 pairs of bedroom slippers for Timothy Rigas to more than $3 million to produce a film by John Rigas' daughter, Ellen, to $26 million on 3,600 acres of timberland to preserve the view outside the father's home.

Prosecutors said John Rigas once even spent $6,000 to fly two Christmas trees to New York for his daughter.

Last year, another son, Michael Rigas, was sentenced to 10 months home confinement after pleading guilty to a charge of making a false entry in a company record.

John Rigas, the son of Greek immigrants, created Adelphia from nothing when he bought the rights to wire the town of Coudersport, Pa., for cable television in 1952.

The problems arose after he took Adelphia public in 1986 and the company grew rapidly in the late 1990s.

Adelphia served more than 5 million customers in 31 states. It collapsed into bankruptcy in 2002.

It moved to Greenwood Village, Colo. Comcast Corp. in Philadelphia and Time Warner Cable, a unit of Time Warner Inc., have since bought Adelphia's cable assets.

The Supreme Court yesterday gave the benefit of the doubt to a FedEx worker who claimed age discrimination, and said her case should not be thrown out because of mistakes made by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The court ruled 7 to 2 that Patricia Kennedy's suit could move forward, even though her employer had not been notified by the EEOC that Kennedy and others had made charges against it, as the Age Discrimination in Employment Act requires.

The act says that a formal charge must be made with the agency before a lawsuit can be filed, and that in that interim, the EEOC is to notify the company, investigate the claim and seek conciliation between the employer and employee before lawyers and judges become involved.

At oral argument, it became clear that the form Kennedy filed with the EEOC sometimes was considered by the agency to constitute a formal charge, and sometimes not. Justices criticized the government for the inconsistency, and it responded that it is changing its policies.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion said that because of the lack of clarity on the part of EEOC, "both sides lost the benefits" of the informal dispute resolution process, and it again criticized the agency.

But the majority said that the form and documents Patricia Kennedy filed could be considered a formal charge and that she should be allowed to proceed with her lawsuit.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dissented, saying the court's "malleability" was wrong.

"Given the court's utterly vague criteria, whatever the agency later decides to regard as a charge is a charge -- and the statutorily required notice to the employer and conciliation process will be evaded in the future as it has been in this case," wrote Thomas, who was head of the EEOC for a time in the 1980s.

The decision was the court's second in two days regarding the age discrimination statute, both of them rather narrowly drawn. The case is Federal Express Corp. v. Holowecki

In the case being argued Wednesday, Exxon Mobil Corp. wants the court to erase the award of punitive damages to nearly 33,000 commercial fishermen, Native Alaskans, landowners, businesses and local governments.

The 987-foot tanker, commanded by its captain, Joseph Hazelwood, missed a turn and ran aground on a reef in Prince William Sound, causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Two brothers from Cordova, Alaska, were in line in front of the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning, waiting to watch the arguments inside.

Commercial fisherman Steve Copeland, who was 41 at the time of the spill, said he cannot afford to retire because his business has never recovered from the steep decline it suffered due to the disaster.

His brother, Tom, said that Exxon "needs to get told they need to be a better corporate citizen."

A jury initially awarded $287 million to compensate for economic losses and $5 billion in punitive damages. A federal appeals court cut the punitive damages in half. The compensatory damages have been paid.

Now Exxon says it should not face any punitive damages because the company already has paid $3.4 billion in fines, penalties, cleanup costs, claims and other expenses.

It argues that long-standing maritime law and the 1970s-era Clean Water Act should bar any punitive damages, which are intended both to punish behavior and deter a repeat.

The company says it should not be held accountable for Hazelwood's reckless conduct. He left the bridge of the ship before the turn and had been drinking shortly before it left port, both in violation of Coast Guard rules and company policy.

The plaintiffs say the judgment, representing three weeks of Exxon's 2006 profit, is rational and proportionate. It takes account of Exxon's decision to allow Hazelwood to command the ship, despite knowing he had an ongoing drinking problem, the plaintiffs contend.

Justice Samuel Alito, who owns Exxon stock, is not taking part in the case. A 4-4 split would leave the damages award in place.

A jury convicted Mark Jensen last week of killing Julie Jensen on Dec. 3, 1998, in their Pleasant Prairie home. Some jurors cited the letter as a key piece of evidence.

Julie Jensen left the note with a neighbor to give to police if something happened to her.

"I pray that I am wrong and nothing happens, but I am suspicious of Mark's suspicious behaviors and fear for my early demise," Julie Jensen wrote in the letter. She said she refused to leave because of their two young sons.

Mark Jensen, her husband of 14 years, claimed she was depressed, committed suicide and framed him. At the time, Mark Jensen was having an affair with a woman he has since married.

He faces a mandatory penalty of life in prison during sentencing, set for Wednesday. The judge was to determine if he should ever be eligible for parole.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a California case with similar elements in April. Legal experts say if the court overturns that conviction, it could pave the way for Mark Jensen to get a new trial.

"It would surprise me if he didn't get a new trial based on that," said Phillip A. Koss, a University of Wisconsin-Madison adjunct professor and Walworth County district attorney.

Mark Jensen, now 48, was charged with first-degree murder in 2002, but legal wrangling over evidence delayed the trial repeatedly.

The evidence included the letter, as well as Julie Jensen's statements to police, a neighbor and her son's teacher about her suspicions.

A federal jury in Kansas City, Kan., ruled against Mendelsohn after a judge excluded the testimony of five ex-employees from other departments at Sprint headquarters who claimed they had been released because of their age. Lawyers refer to such testimony as "me, too" evidence.

Sprint let Mendelsohn go in 2002 amid companywide layoffs that eventually numbered more than 14,000. She was part of the company's business development strategy group, which was scaled back from 75 employees to 57.

The supervisor who laid off Mendelsohn said she was the weakest performer in his unit.

Sprint's lawyers argued in Supreme Court that if a different supervisor at a company harbors bias, that's unfortunate, but it is not relevant to the claim by the person who filed the lawsuit. Sprint argued that such information unfairly prejudices a jury against a company.

The Bush administration took a middle ground between Sprint and Mendelsohn, saying evidence of age bias is sometimes admissible when it is committed by other supervisors at the same company. It cited as an example another supervisor dismissing an employee, saying the company is on a youth campaign.

In Mendelsohn's case, none of the five employees who would have testified on her behalf was laid off by Mendelsohn's supervisor and none worked in her business development group. The five were laid off as many as nine months before Mendelsohn and as many as three months after.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver sent the case back for a new trial, saying the testimony of the five ex-employees supported an alleged companywide age discriminatory scheme.