The Supreme Court is trying to sort out whether drug companies can be sued for claims of serious side effects from childhood vaccines without driving vaccine makers from the market and risking a public health crisis.

The court heard argument Tuesday in an appeal filed by Pittsburgh area parents who want to sue Pfizer Inc.'s Wyeth for the serious health problems they say their 18-year-old daughter suffered from a vaccine she received in infancy.

Several justices appeared sympathetic to the parents' claims.

Wyeth, backed by the Obama administration and many public health groups, argued that Congress shielded drug companies from most vaccine lawsuits when it created a special vaccine court 24 years ago to handle the claims.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed skeptical of a $14 million judgment given to a former death row inmate who accused New Orleans prosecutors of withholding evidence to help convict him of murder.

John Thompson, who at one point was only weeks away from being executed, successfully sued the district attorney's office in New Orleans, arguing that former District Attorney Harry Connick showed deliberate indifference by not providing adequate training for assistant district attorneys.

Prosecutors normally have immunity for their actions while working, but Thompson convinced a jury that the district attorney's office had not trained its lawyers sufficiently on how to handle evidence. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was split evenly on appeal, which upheld the lower court verdict.

"They all knew what not to produce. What they didn't know was what to produce," Thompson's lawyer J. Gordon Cooney said.

But justices repeatedly questioned how much training would be enough to satisfy any new legal standard on Brady rights for prosecutors. Brady rights are named after the Supreme Court's Brady v. Maryland case, which says prosecutors violate a defendant's constitutional rights by not turning over evidence that could prove a person's innocence.

The Supreme Court won't decide who really owns the initials "SC" when it comes to college sports: the University of Southern California or the University of South Carolina.

The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from South Carolina, which wanted to trademark a baseball cap logo with the initials "SC."

The Trojans already have a trademark on a version of "SC" and say the Gamecocks' symbol looks too much like theirs. The California school says it has sold tens of millions of dollars of apparel with "SC" on it, while South Carolina only wanted to start using those initials on baseball caps in 1997.

Courts have rejected South Carolina's trademark.

The case is University of South Carolina v. University of Southern California, 09-1270.

A federal appeals court has declined to fast-track a challenge against a Minnesota law requiring disclosure of corporate political spending.

In an order Monday, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals denied a motion to expedite the case, and it scheduled oral arguments for Jan. 11 in St. Louis, well after the election.

Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, the Taxpayers League of Minnesota and a travel company are trying to overturn the law on free-speech grounds.

U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank last month refused to block the state law.

The groups have also asked the 8th Circuit for an injunction to suspend enforcement of the disclosure law while their appeal is considered. The appeals court took that request under advisement.

The execution of a convicted rapist-murderer in California has been called off after rulings in state and federal courts, officials said Wednesday.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation removed Albert Greenwood Brown's execution from its calendar on Wednesday, a few hours after the California Supreme Court denied the state's request to proceed with the scheduled execution on Thursday night.

The state filed the request early Wednesday, after a federal court judge blocked Brown's execution Tuesday night. The execution would have been California's first since 2006, when challenges to the constitutionality of lethal injection forced the state to revise its measures.

One thing Al Snyder wants to make clear: His boy fought and died for freedom in Iraq, but not for the right of some "wackos" to spew hate at soldiers' funerals under the protection of the Constitution.

"It's an insult to myself, my family and the veterans to say this is what our military men and women died for," Snyder says, barely concealing his anger.

Yet more than four years after the death of his only son, Matthew, Snyder is in the middle of a Supreme Court case that raises almost precisely that issue.

The court is set to decide whether members of a fundamentalist church in Kansas who picketed Matthew's funeral with signs bearing anti-gay and anti-Catholic invective have a constitutional right to say what they want.