A federal appeals court agrees with the method a trustee used to calculate how much each investor lost in the multibillion-dollar fraud carried out by Bernard Madoff.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a written decision Tuesday that investors are only entitled to recover the amount they originally invested with Madoff.

Lawyers for investors had argued that they should be entitled to recover profits as well.

Madoff had told thousands of investors just before his December 2008 arrest that their investments had more than tripled. Madoff claimed the original investment of about $20 billion had grown to more than $60 billion. Prosecutors say it was actually a Ponzi scheme.

Madoff is serving a 150-year sentence after admitting the massive multi-decade fraud.

A former University of Georgia head football coach has settled a legal dispute with a bankrupt liquidation company that accused him of recruiting other high-profile coaches to invest in a Ponzi scheme, according to federal court documents filed this week.

Jim Donnan and his wife agreed to transfer about $5.5 million in cash, stocks and other assets to West Virginia-based GLC Ltd. to settle claims he profited by convincing investors to pump money into the company. Donnan has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing and defense attorney Ed Tolley said his client was "absolutely not involved in a Ponzi scheme."

The settlement was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Bankruptcy Court and must be approved by a federal judge. It would end months of litigation between the Donnans and GLC, which claimed the ex-coach invested more than $5.4 million in the firm and that his family ultimately made more than $14.5 million.

GLC, a liquidation company that purchased and then resold surplus retail products, is being restructured in an Ohio bankruptcy court and is now being run by new operators who targeted Donnan in the court filings.

The firm said Donnan received a commission of up to 20 percent for each investment, and assured each potential investor the money would be used to buy retail items from major companies, according to court records. But only about $12 million of the $82 million was spent on inventory, the firm said.

Fifteen incarcerated men who claim they were sent to prison by confessions that were beaten, burned and tortured out of them by convicted Chicago police Lt. Jon Burge and his officers are getting some high-profile help — including from a former Illinois governor.

In a friend-of-the-court brief to be filed Wednesday with the Illinois Supreme Court, ex-Gov. Jim Thompson and more than 60 current and former prosecutors, judges and lawmakers are asking for new evidentiary hearings for inmates who say their convictions were based on coerced confessions.

The brief marks the first effort on behalf of alleged Burge victims as a group and not separate individual cases, attorneys said.

Burge's name has become synonymous with police abuse in the nation's third-largest city, and more than 100 men — most of them African-American and Latino— have alleged Burge and his men tortured them from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Burge was convicted last year of lying about whether he ever witnessed or participated in the torture of suspects. He's serving a 4 1/2-year sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.

Burge never has faced criminal charges for abuse. He was fired from the police department in 1993 over the 1982 beating and burning of Andrew Wilson, a suspect later convicted of killing two police officers.