The opponents, mainly Democrats, view voter ID a modern-day poll tax that disproportionately affect poor, minority and elderly voters — who tend to back Democrats. Yet, a federal judge found that opponents of the law were unable to produce evidence of a single Indiana resident who had been barred from voting because of the law.

The Supreme Court, which famously split 5-4 in the case that sealed the 2000 presidential election for George Bush, will take up the Indiana law on January 9, just as the 2008 presidential primaries are getting under way.

A decision should come by late June, in time to be felt in the November elections in Indiana and in Georgia, the other state with a strict photo ID requirement, as well as in a handful of other states.

The justices will be asked to decide whether the law is an impermissible attempt to discourage certain voters or a reasonable precaution among several efforts aimed at cutting down on illegal voting.

"There's more than a little bit of irony in going to the Supreme Court and asking them to rise above partisan politics in election cases," said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The court's decision in the disputed 2000 election is partly responsible for the ensuing increase in election-related lawsuits and the loss of confidence by some groups in the voting system, Hasen said. Yet, the other branches of government seem more politicized than ever, leaving the court as the best option despite the 2000 election dispute, he said.

Indiana argues that demands for identification are frequent in today's society, and producing a photo ID at polling places is hardly onerous.

"In light of such widespread demands for ... government-issued photo identification, it is almost shocking that in late 2007 Indiana can be characterized as even unusual in requiring it at the polls," the state said in its court filing.

The Bush administration maintains states need not wait for fraud to occur to take action to prevent it. "The state's interest in deterring voter fraud before it happens is evident from the monumental harm that can come from such fraud," the government said in its supporting brief.

The law's opponents counter that an ID may be just one card among many in most people's wallets, but some groups are far less likely to have them.

Homeless people wanting to vote might face the most difficulty under the law. While the state will provide a voter ID card free of charge to the poor, applicants still must have a birth certificate or other documentation to get the ID card.

"I think it's wonderful, but if you can't prove who you are, you can't get an ID," said Carter Wolf, executive director of Horizon House, which provides services to homeless people.

Getting a birth certification isn't always easy, Wolf said, or cheap. Sometimes it can cost $60 to $70 to get a birth certificate from other states.

"Obtaining a photo identification card under Indiana law requires documentation that is difficult, if not impossible, for many homeless individuals to provide," Carter Phillips, a leading Supreme Court lawyer, wrote in a supporting brief.

Even without an ID, indigent people can cast provisional ballots, then show up within 10 days at county offices and sign a form attesting to their vote.

But the Marion County Election Board, which includes Indianapolis, said just two of 34 voters who cast provisional ballots because they lacked voter ID showed up at county offices to validate their vote in the 2007 municipal election. Their signatures all matched those on file, but could not be counted because of the photo ID requirement.

Hasen said while neither side has abundant evidence to back its position the fraud argument is far less plausible than the claim that and ID requirement will reduce voter turnout.

Someone wanting to sway an election through fraud would be unlikely to get individuals to show up at the polls, pretend to be someone else and then ask them to cast a secret, unverifiable ballot, said Hasen.

But he said, "When voting is more difficult, people tend to not vote."

Opponents to the law argue the real potential for voter fraud lies in the filing of absentee ballots and that Indiana has made it easier to vote absentee in recent years.

Bradley's lawyer quit before the trial, and a Sonoma County judge appointed a replacement in a hearing from which Bradley and her chosen lawyer were excluded. When Bradley sought to dismiss the new lawyer because of conflicts, Superior Court Judge Knoel Owen refused, saying the trial had already been delayed by almost two years and it wasn't clear Bradley could pay for her own lawyer.

In Wednesday's 9-2 ruling granting Bradley a new trial, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said nearly all the pretrial delays were the results of judges' decisions, not Bradley's.

Noting that Bradley's trial lawyer disagreed with her on a possible plea agreement and on whether she should testify, the court said the trial judge's decision had created an adversary relationship between lawyer and client.

Defense lawyer Dennis Riordan praised the ruling and said a new trial could result in a lesser conviction, for second-degree murder or manslaughter. Deputy Attorney General Gregory Ott, who represented the prosecution, said the court disregarded a federal law that requires federal judges to defer to state court rulings unless they are clearly wrong.

The Supreme Court restored federal judges Monday to their traditional central role in criminal sentencing.

In two decisions, the court said U.S. district judges have broad discretion to impose what they think are reasonable sentences, even if federal guidelines call for different sentences.

One decision was particularly emphatic in saying judges are free to disagree with guidelines that call for much longer sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine than for crimes involving an equivalent amount of cocaine in powdered form.

Monday's decisions include an important racial dimension: A 2002 report noted that 85 percent of defendants convicted of crack offenses were black, a fact the U.S. Sentencing Commission warned was leading to a loss of confidence in the fairness of the system.

Both cases, each decided by the same 7-2 alignment, chided federal appeals courts for failing to give district judges sufficient leeway. In each case, the appeals court had overturned a sentence that was shorter than that provided by the guidelines. The two dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr.

Judges still may not impose sentences above the range written into law by Congress or state legislatures.

But the decision Monday gives judges broad discretion to impose sentences higher or lower than the federal guidelines, which are not statutes and are issued by the Sentencing Commission.

The two decisions answered questions left hanging in 2005, when the court ruled that federal sentencing guidelines could be constitutional only if advisory rather than mandatory. Appeals courts were to review sentences for "reasonableness," the court said then. But the court did not say what it meant by either advisory or reasonableness.

"The guidelines should be the starting point and the initial benchmark," Justice John Paul Stevens said in one of the decisions Monday, Gall vs. United States.

But Stevens went on to say that the guidelines are just one factor in the "individualized assessment" that a judge must make in every case.

In that case, Brian Gall, who had briefly been involved in an ecstasy distribution ring while a college student, received a sentence of three years' probation rather than 30 to 36 months in prison called for by the guidelines.

The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in St. Louis, ruled that such an extraordinary variance from the guidelines range required an equivalently extraordinary justification.

That judgment was erroneous, Stevens said, in failing to give due deference to the district judge's reasoned and reasonable decision.

The defendant in the crack cocaine case, Derrick Kimbrough, received 15 years instead of 19 to 221/2 for several cocaine and gun-related offenses.

The trial judge said the higher guidelines term would be inappropriate for Kimbrough, a Marine veteran of the Persian Gulf War with an honorable discharge.

The judge also disagreed with the relative treatment of crack and powdered cocaine, a disparity that he said led to disproportionate and unjust results.

The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Va., overturned the sentence on the grounds that it was unreasonable for a judge to depart from the guidelines "based on a disagreement with the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine offenses."

The Supreme Court took the unusual step of reinstating the original lower sentences, rather than simply instructing the appeals courts to reconsider the cases under an appropriately deferential standard of review.

In her majority opinion in Kimbrough vs. United States, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took account of an important policy development since the case was argued Oct. 2. On Nov. 1, amended guidelines for crack cocaine that the U.S. Sentencing Commission had long advocated took effect when Congress, which had the power to block them, let the moment pass without acting.

Ginsburg said acceptance of the amendment by Congress undermined the government's position that judges should not have discretion to depart from the guidelines themselves. The amendments put into effect a relatively modest change that will reduce sentences for crack by about one-quarter.

The Sentencing Commission was limited in what it could accomplish on its own. A 1986 federal law, enacted at the height of public concern about crack, incorporated a 100-to-1 ratio into mandatory minimum sentences - that is, the same sentence was imposed for a given amount of crack and 100 times that amount of powder.

Bipartisan bills are pending in Congress to address the disparity. Today, the Sentencing Commission will vote on whether to make the Nov. 1 amendment retroactive to the 19,500 inmates imprisoned for crack offenses.