Prosecutors say the grandmother set a fire that killed five people, including three young girls, because she was allegedly angry her son's ex-girlfriend wouldn't let him see his two kids.

Her trial is set to begin Tuesday on murder and arson charges after an extraordinary delay while her lawyer fought to keep the jury from hearing an alleged confession she made after the Feb. 24, 1999, blaze in a Lynn triple-decker.

Her grandchildren survived, but the blaze killed another family in the building.

Hilton, now 62, has spent most of the last decade at MCI-Framingham, a medium-security women's prison where she works in the kitchen and watches television, said her attorney, Michael Natola.

In Massachusetts, it usually takes one to two years for murder cases to go to trial.

"Ten years is aberrational," said Michael Cassidy, a professor at Boston College Law School. "Sometimes, complex murder cases can take two or three years to get to trial but 10 years is well beyond the average."

Natola said he had to push for the statements to be suppressed — no matter how long it took. The case twice went to the Supreme Judicial Court.

The issue is a pressing one in areas where intimidation by gang members, drug dealers and other defendants is making potential witnesses afraid they or their loved ones will be harmed or killed if they take the stand.

The state Supreme Court in Trenton heard nearly two hours of arguments Monday on a case that deals with what the state Attorney General's Office calls "the greatest threat" to prosecution in gang, organized crime and domestic violence cases.

The state wants to be allowed let jurors hear the out-of-court statements of witnesses who have been threatened without presenting the witnesses themselves.

But defense lawyers argue that would not be fair to defendants, who have the Constitutional right to confront their accusers in court.

Deputy Attorney General Daniel Bornstein told the court he has read numerous media accounts of witnesses being intimidated or threatened around the state.

Judge James Conlogue found the boy guilty after a hearing Friday in Cochise County Superior Court in the southern Arizona town of Bisbee. The boy is not being identified because he was charged as a juvenile.

Conlogue ruled that prosecutors had proved the boy acted intentionally and with premeditation when he shot Sara Madrid, 34, eight times on Aug. 1. The shooting happened after the boy had argued with his mother over his chores.

Madrid had left the family home after the argument, and the boy got a .22-caliber pistol from her bedroom closet, waited for her to return and then repeatedly shot her, according to court testimony.

Madrid's live-in boyfriend of 10 years, Alfonso Munoz, witnessed the shooting and said the boy gave him the empty gun afterward.

Munoz, who helped raise the boy, said he had taught the child how to use the weapon for emergencies and self-defense.

The boy's lawyer, Sanford Edleman, had argued that the boy did not intend to kill his mother but only wanted to get back at her for abusing him.

The ruling upholds the felony guilty plea of Mark Jahnke, who videotaped his girlfriend while she was naked and while they were having sex. He argued in his appeal that because the woman agreed to be naked around him, she had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

The state Department of Justice argued that shared intimacy does not give a person the right to film another unknowingly.

Jahnke's attorney, Michael Herbert of Madison, argued that the court had found in a previous case that a reasonable expectation of privacy existed when a nude person reasonably believed he or she was "secluded from the presence of others."

Prosecutors argued the video voyeur law would make no sense under that interpretation. The appeals court agreed, saying the definition in the previous case was not intended to cover all circumstances.

Judge Charles Dykman, the dissenter in the 2-1 decision, said the 2001 law does not specifically prohibit what Jahnke did.

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen praised the ruling.

"Wisconsin's citizens enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy not to be secretly videotaped while in the nude, and Wisconsin's criminal law has been correctly interpreted to protect that expectation," he said.

The Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of the families in Pulaski County Circuit Court seeking to overturn Act 1, which was approved by voters in last month's general election.

"Act 1 violates the state's legal duty to place the best interest of children above all else," said Marie-Bernarde Miller, a Little Rock attorney in the lawsuit.

The group filed the lawsuit on behalf of 29 adults and children from more than a dozen families, including a grandmother who lives with her same-sex partner of nine years and is the only relative able and willing to adopt her grandchild, who is now in Arkansas state care.

The plaintiffs also include Stephanie Huffman and Wendy Rickman, a lesbian couple raising two sons together who want to adopt a foster child from the state.

The 5-year-old kindergarten student in Hyannis, Mass., told her parents that in 2000 a third-grade boy repeatedly made her lift her dress, pull down her underwear and spread her legs.

Local police and the school system investigated, but found insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges or definitively sort out the story, according to court records. The district refused to assign the boy to another bus or put a monitor on the bus, records show.

Upset with the school district's response, parents Lisa and Robert Fitzgerald sued the district in federal court under both Title IX, which bars sex discrimination at schools that receive federal money, and a provision of a Civil War era, anti-discrimination law that was designed to enforce the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

The issue for the court is whether Title IX, enacted in 1972, rules out suits under the older provision.

A federal judge ruled that the Fitzgeralds could not sue under the older law because Congress had subsequently passed Title IX. The Fitzgeralds also lost on their Title IX claims. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling.

The justices appeared skeptical of the idea that Congress, in legislation expanding protection from discrimination, would cut back on the ability to sue for violations of constitutional rights. But they also wondered whether the Fitzgeralds ultimately would win their lawsuit.