Will former media mogul Conrad Black end up going back to prison?

A status hearing Thursday in Chicago isn't expected to answer that question definitively. But it could provide clues about what U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve's inclined to do.

After serving two years of a 6 1/2-year sentence, Black was released from a Florida prison last year pending appeal.

An appeals court in October reversed two of the 66-year-old's fraud convictions. It cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling curtailing "honest services."

But it let stand a fraud and obstruction of justice conviction. Judge St. Eve's options include resentencing Black or freeing him for good based on time served.

Among the steps she could take Thursday is scheduling a resentencing date.

Hollis King and his two friends might be the unluckiest pot smokers in Kentucky.

The three men were sitting around King's apartment in Lexington, Ky., on a Thursday night in October 2005, when police officers knocked on the front door, then kicked it in. They did not have a search warrant.

The police were looking for a man who fled into an apartment building after selling cocaine to an informant. They heard a door slam in a hallway, but by the time they were able to look down it, they saw only two closed doors.

They didn't know which one the suspect had gone through, but, smelling the aroma of burnt pot, chose the apartment on the left.

Their quarry had gone into the apartment on the right. But in King's place, they found one person smoking pot and a small amount of cocaine and money, and arrested King and his friends.

King pleaded guilty to drug charges, but the Kentucky Supreme Court threw out the evidence against him and the conviction, ruling that the police did not have cause to burst into his home without a warrant.

Lawmakers are weighing the benefit of accessibility with the necessity of security in the aftermath of a shooting at a political meet-and-greet outside an Arizona supermarket.

Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords remained in critical condition Sunday after being shot in the head at the event Saturday. The gunman killed six people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 14 others, authorities said. The suspected shooter is in custody.

There was no security at the political gathering, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said. At such events, "there's never security unless there's advance intelligence that there may be a problem of some kind," he said, noting that Giffords often attends as many as eight events in a single day.

"But it's not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included. And that's the sad thing about what's going on in America. Pretty soon, we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people who are willing to subject themselves to serve in public office," Dupnik said.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco has ruled that a strip search of a male inmate by a female guard was unconstitutional.

In a 6-5 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said the search of the inmate Charles Byrd at a minimum-security jail in Maricopa County, Ariz., in 2004 was a "humiliating event" that violated his rights.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a three-judge appeals court panel ordered Byrd's civil rights lawsuit dismissed in 2009.

In its ruling Wednesday, the court determined that cross-gender searches of intimate areas violate the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches.

A federal appeals court reinstated a 2009 jury verdict Tuesday that Microsoft Corp. infringed on patents held by software maker Uniloc Inc., reversing a judge's decision to the contrary, but it also granted Microsoft a new trial on damages.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the jury's April 2009 verdict on patent infringement was supported by "substantial" evidence, so it reversed a federal judge's decision in September of that year that overturned the jury's verdict.

Irvine, Calif.-based Uniloc makes software that prevents people from illegally installing software on multiple computers. In a lawsuit filed in 2003, Uniloc argued that Microsoft's "product activation" system used in Windows XP, Office XP and Office 2003 programs infringed on several parts of a related patent, and that the software maker had copied Uniloc's technology rather than develop similar work on its own.

The jury in 2009 had found this to be the case, and awarded Uniloc $388 million in damages. On Tuesday, the appeals court agreed on the patent infringement but called the jury's damages award "fundamentally tainted," and granted a new trial on the damages.

In a statement, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel David Howard called the ruling an "an important and helpful opinion with respect to the law of damages, and it may signal the end of unreasonable and outsized damages awards based on faulty methodology."

The Nevada Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal by a group that tried to pass a constitutional ban on abortions this year because the election is over.

The court ruled in a decision filed Thursday that Personhood Nevada's fight to rewrite the state constitution was moot because the group failed to secure the necessary signatures to put its question on the 2010 ballot.

The Las Vegas Sun reports that Personhood Nevada wants voters to replace the word "person" in the Nevada Constitution with the term "human being." The group says life starts at conception.

But opponents said the ballot language was vague and contained more than one subject in violation of Nevada's election laws. A district court agreed and shot down the proposed petition.