In a motion filed hours before the court deadline on Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius argued that Congress acted well within its authority. It also claims Virginia lacks jurisdiction to sue.

State Attorney General Ken sued hours after Congress passed the sweeping health reform bill in March.

He alleged that by requiring Virginians to buy health coverage or pay a fee, Congress exceeded its authority under the 10th Amendment.

Sebelius argues that the new law is well within the scope of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether a Texas death row inmate should have access to evidence for DNA testing that he says could clear him of three murders.

The justices said Monday they will use the case of Hank Skinner to decide whether prison inmates may use a federal civil rights law to do DNA testing that was not performed prior to their conviction.

Federal appeals courts around the country have decided the issue differently. The high court previously blocked Skinner's execution while it considered his appeal.

Skinner, 47, faced lethal injection for the bludgeoning and strangling of his girlfriend, Twila Jean Busby, 40, and the stabbing of her two adult sons. The slayings occurred at their home in the Texas Panhandle town of Pampa on New Year's Eve in 1993.

He was arrested about three hours after the bodies were found. Police found him in a closet at the trailer home of a woman he knew. He was splattered with the blood of at least two of the victims.

Elena Kagan, a Supreme Court nominee without judicial experience, has suggested in writings and speeches over a quarter-century that when judges make decisions, they must take account of their values and experience and consider politics and policy, rather than act as robotic umpires.

Not since 1972 has a president picked someone for the high court who hasn't been a judge. So what the 50-year-old Kagan has said about judging might be the best indicator of the kind of justice she would be.

Republicans have said that because Kagan hasn't left a trail of judicial opinions, they will pore over her records as a Clinton White House aide and academic for any clues. Her speeches and papers from her time as dean of the Harvard Law School and, before that as a law professor and graduate student, are certain to get close attention at her confirmation hearing in late June.

Her words stand in contrast to the more technical view of judging voiced by Chief Justice John Roberts at his confirmation hearing five years ago. Roberts said he considered himself an umpire merely calling balls and strikes.

Kagan apparently has never directly addressed Roberts' comments. Republicans have held his description of the job as a model of judicial restraint and used it to criticize President Barack Obama for what they call his support of judicial activism — judges imposing their own views on the law.

A federal appeals court says the civilian courts do not have authority to hear the cases of three detainees imprisoned at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

The detainees had petitioned the courts seeking to be freed.

The jurisdiction of the U.S. courts does not extend to foreigners held in the Bagram facility in the Afghan theater of war, three appeals court judges said in a unanimous decision. The appeals judges said a U.S. district judge should have thrown out the detainees' petitions.

The ruling noted that the U.S. is holding the detainees through a cooperative arrangement with Afghanistan on Afghan territory.

"While we cannot say that extending our constitutional protections to the detainees would be in any way disruptive of that relationship, neither can we say with certainty what the reaction of the Afghan government would be," said the opinion written by Judge David Sentelle.

Prominent Southfield attorney Geoffrey Fieger called "absurd" any suggestion the shot fired by police officer during a raid that killed a 7-year-old girl Sunday morning was the result of an altercation between the cop and the girl's grandmother.

Fieger said today at an hour-long press conference he has filed lawsuits on behalf of the family of slain Aiyana Jones in both federal and state courts. The federal lawsuit argues the police violated the girl's constitutional rights and it seeks an award of more than $75,000. The state suit contains four counts and seeks damages in excess of $25,000.

Fieger said a three-minute video taken of the raid shows the gunshot fired came from the porch of the two-story duplex on the 4000 block of Lillibridge shortly after a "flash-bang" grenade was thrown into the home, contradicting police accounts.

The Supreme Court has ruled that teenagers may not be locked up for life without chance of parole if they haven't killed anyone.

By a 5-4 vote Monday, the court says the Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.

The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

"The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. "This the Eighth Amendment does not permit."

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with Kennedy and the court's four liberal justices about Graham. But Roberts said he does not believe the ruling should extend to all young offenders who are locked up for crimes other than murder; he was a "no" vote on the ruling.

Life sentences with no chance of parole are rare and harsh for juveniles tried as adults and convicted of crimes less serious than killing, although roughly three dozen states allow for the possibility of such prison terms. Just over 100 prison inmates in the United States are serving those terms, according to data compiled by opponents of the sentences.

Those inmates are in Florida and seven other states — California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina — according to a Florida State University study. More than 2,000 other juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone. Their sentences are not affected by Monday's decision.