Recent decisions by judges and elected officials have made clear that most executions will not proceed until the Supreme Court rules in a challenge by two death row inmates to the lethal injection procedures used by Kentucky. The inmates say Kentucky's method creates the risk of pain severe enough to be cruel and unusual punishment, banned by the Eighth Amendment.

Similar procedures are used by Texas, the far-and-away leader in lethal injections, and the 16 other states that have executed prisoners in the past two years.

It is clear the high court will not go so far as to outlaw the use of lethal injections. That issue is not even before the court in the Kentucky case.

Rather, the justices could decide whether Kentucky's procedures violate the Constitution and what standard the courts should use to evaluate the risk a prisoner will feel pain as he is put to death.

No matter how the court rules, it appears there will be few, if any, prisoners executed before the court rules, probably by late June.

"We're probably looking at delaying executions, not preventing them," said Ronald Tabak, a New York-based lawyer with the Skadden Arps firm who has represented death row inmates.

Tabak said states with the death penalty now have a chance to review capital punishment procedures. The American Bar Association has for the past 10 years called for such a freeze and review.

"The ABA's position is unless you have fair practices, executions should not resume," said Tabak, who has worked with the lawyers' organization on this issue.

But Douglas Berman, a sentencing expert at the Ohio State University law school, said the possibility exists for more dramatic action.

"The abolitionists will say if we have no executions for six months to a year, and the universe is not imploding and murder rates are not going through the roof ... it becomes easier to say, 'Why do we even need the death penalty, let's just get rid of it,'" Berman said.

"Texas and other high-execution states aren't going to get there anytime soon, but the argument against capital punishment gets even more force in those states squeamish about the death penalty in the first instance," Berman said.

Questions about the administration of lethal injections are only part of the equation.

Death-penalty opponents also have pointed to doubts about the competence of some court-appointed defense lawyers and the rise in the number of exonerations through DNA evidence of people already convicted of crimes.

Polling has shown that the public increasingly believes that life in prison without parole will keep the worst offenders off the streets. A recent Associated Presss-Ipsos poll that asked what method of punishment people prefer for murderers found only a slight preference for the death penalty over life in prison — 52 percent to 46 percent.

"There is a deeper societal appreciation for life without the possibility of parole. Ten to 15 years ago, no one thought they meant it," Berman said.

At the same time, there have been several studies, challenged by the anti-death penalty camp, that have shown a deterrent effect in the use of capital punishment. Also, public support for executions remains high. More than two-thirds of those polled favor the death penalty for murderers when the question does not include other possible punishments.

Then there is the example of the last time the country went without executions for an extended period. There were no executions from June 1967 to January 1977.

The Supreme Court in 1972 struck down 40 state death penalty laws, but did not ban capital punishment as cruel and unusual.

Some justices at the time thought their decision in Furman v. Georgia would bring an end to the death penalty.

By 1976, though, in the midst of a "law-and-order" backlash to the court's decisions in favor of the rights of criminal defendants, elected officials in 35 states had adopted laws to comply with the death penalty ruling.

A more conservative court upheld some of those laws, and a half-year later executions resumed.

A senior official from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union has appeared in the Perth Magistrates court to face a charge of trespass.

It is alleged the assistant secretary of the union, Joe McDonald, entered the Lakeside Shopping Centre building site at Joondalup in February and refused to leave when asked by site official.

The court has heard Mr McDonald had his state and federal tickets to enter building sites revoked in July last year.

Today his lawyer argued Mr McDonald was on the site lawfully and left within a reasonable time after he was requested to do so.

The Magistrate, Joe Randazzo, reserved his judgement until Thursday so he could consider relevant case law.

The Brooklyn man pleaded guilty to a violation after spending a night in jail, but he later appealed. Courts have upheld his arrest so far.

His lawyer, Nancy E. Little, said Wednesday there was no legal justification for arresting Jones for simply standing on the street.

"You need something more," she said. "You need to be being verbally abusive, or really blocking lots of people, or lying down on the sidewalk."

But assistant Manhattan district attorney Paula Rose-Stark said the disorderly conduct arrest was warranted, noting that Jones' behavior stood out "amid the inevitable hustle and bustle of Times Square."

Prosecutors' arguments drew several questions Wednesday from judges — including Chief Judge Judith Kaye, who wondered aloud how bustling Times Square was when Jones was arrested around 2 a.m.

"Some courts are being prudent by waiting to see how the Supreme Court will go," said Lisa McCalmont, a consultant to the death penalty clinic at the University of California at Berkeley law school.

Fewer than 50 executions will take place this year, even if several states pushing ahead with lethal injections defeat legal efforts to stop them. The last time executions numbered fewer than 50 was in 1996, when there were 45.

Since executions resumed in this country in 1977 after a Supreme Court-ordered halt, 1,099 inmates have died in state and federal execution chambers. The highest annual total was 98 in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.

So far this year, 42 people have been executed. Texas, where 26 prisoners have been executed this year, plans no more executions in 2007 after federal and state judges stopped four death sentences from being carried out.

Executions also have been delayed in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas and Oklahoma since the court announced Sept. 25 it would hear a challenge to Kentucky's lethal injection method. Courts in California, Delaware, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee have previously cited problems with lethal injections procedures in stopping executions.

The last person executed in this country was Michael Richard, 49, who died by lethal injection in Texas the same day the Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutionality of lethal injection procedures in Kentucky. A Texas state judge refused that day to accept an appeal from Richard's lawyers, saying it had arrived after office hours.

Kentucky's method of lethal injection executions is similar to procedures in three dozen other states. The court will consider whether the mix of three drugs used to sedate and kill prisoners has the potential to cause pain severe enough to violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

"The U.S. is clearly in what amounts to a de-facto death penalty moratorium," said Bridgers' attorney David Dow, who runs the Texas Innocence Network out of the University of Houston Law Center.

Josh Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Oregon, and a death penalty supporter, said executions should continue even while the Supreme Court looks at lethal injection.

Marquis distinguished the lethal injection issue from court reviews that led to banning execution of the mentally retarded and people younger than 18 when they committed their crime. "The court's response is not going to be ban all lethal injections. At most, it's going to be reformulate the protocol," Marquis said.

The reprieves for the dozen or so men whose dates to die had been set are likely to be only temporary. Even the lawyers for the Kentucky inmates concede that there are alternative drugs and procedures available that lessen the risk of pain.

Justice Antonin Scalia also has suggested that people are reading too much into the court's decision to take up the Kentucky case. Scalia said Tuesday night he would have allowed Arkansas to proceed with the execution of Jack Jones.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had earlier put off Jones' execution because of the high court review. That decision "was based on the mistaken premise" that the high court wants state and federal judges to intervene every time a defendant raises a court challenge to lethal injection, Scalia said in a statement accompanying the Supreme Court's order that kept the appeals court ruling in place.

In that ruling, the court reinstated the case, which accuses Microsoft and Best Buy of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

The Supreme Court allowed the ruling to stand.

The two companies will now face a class-action lawsuit involving thousands of consumers and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

Allegation of RICO violations are typically seen in cases of organized crime, such as the conviction of mobster John Gotti. RICO, however, is now being used in some civil cases and plaintiffs can be awarded triple the amount of their claimed damages.

In the Microsoft/Best Buy case, plaintiff James Odom complained that during the purchase of a new computer at Best Buy he was enrolled in a free-trial subscription to Microsoft's MSN Internet service without his knowledge and then his credit card was charged for the service once the trial period had expired. He says other customers paying with credit or debit cards also were enrolled in the same fashion.

The suit alleges wire fraud in the transferring of his financial data and, therefore, a violation of the RICO Act.

Odom charged the pair violated RICO in part due to an agreement under which Microsoft invested $200 million in Best Buy and agreed to promote Best Buy's online store through its MSN service. In return, Best Buy agreed to promote MSN service and other Microsoft products in its stores and advertising. The agreement, Odom alleged, led to the MSN enrollment issue.

We conclude that plaintiffs have alleged facts that, if proved, provide sufficient evidence that the various associates function as a continuing unit', the 9th Circuit Court wrote in its findings. The continuing ruling means the behavior by Microsoft and Best Buy was ongoing and not an isolated incident. The court also wrote that if the allegations are true that they establish that the pair shared a common purpose to increase MSN subscribers through fraudulent means.

In papers filed with the Supreme Court, the two companies said their joint marketing did not constitute an ongoing enterprise.

Microsoft officials told Bloomberg News in May after the 9th Circuit Court's decision that the ruling was procedural and did not reflect on the merits of the case. The MSN subscription program at Best Buy concluded in 2003 when Microsoft began to offer refunds to customers.