In a one-sentence order, the court left in place a ruling by the Oregon Supreme Court in favor of Mayola Williams. The state court has repeatedly upheld a verdict against Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA in a fraud trial in 1999.

The judgment has grown to more than $155 million with interest, and Williams stands to collect between $60 million and $65 million, before taxes and payments to her lawyers, said Robert Peck, her Washington-based lawyer.

The justices heard arguments in the case in December, but said Tuesday that they are not passing judgment on the legal issues that were presented. Instead, it is as if the court had declined to hear the case at all.

Philip Morris had argued that the award should be thrown out and a new trial ordered because of flaws in the instructions given jurors before their deliberations.

Business interests had once hoped the high court would use the case to set firm limits on the award of punitive damages, intended to punish a defendant for its behavior and deter a repeat offense.

Peck said the court has signaled a willingness to allow large awards in certain circumstances. "I think we can take from this long tale that if the behavior is sufficiently reprehensible, then larger awards are merited," Peck said.

In a unanimous opinion, the high court refused to reverse the conviction of Michael Rivera, who was found guilty of first degree murder in the shooting death of 16-year-old Marcus Lee and sentenced to 85 years in prison.

Rivera's lawyer wanted to use one of his peremptory challenges on a female juror candidate, but a state judge refused to let him do it. The woman, Deloris Gomez, a business office supervisor at Cook County Hospital's outpatient orthopedic clinic, went on to become the jury forewoman.

The Illinois Supreme Court said she should have been dismissed, but that the error was harmless. Rivera's lawyers argued that the seating of an illegal juror should have required an automatic reversal.

"A state trial court's good faith but erroneous denial of a criminal defendant's peremptory challenge, we hold, does not require automatic reversal of the defendant's conviction, provided that all persons seated on the jury are qualified and unbiased," said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court.

The frauds involved so-called "straw buyers" — people who received a fee for agreeing to use their name and credit information to obtain mortgages on dozens of properties. Such scams have proliferated around the country in recent years, although rarely in such a high-profile location as Wednesday's bust.

The Hamptons have long been a getaway for the rich and famous, with celebrities and wealthy New Yorkers spending exorbitant amounts of money on mansions and summer rentals. Prosecutors said some of the homes that were rented to vacationers were fraudulently purchased through the mortgage fraud scheme.

The straw buyers either filled out phony loan applications claiming inflated or nonexistent incomes — in one case claiming a salary of nearly $450,000 a year — or said they were employed by corporations controlled by some of the schemers, Spota said.

One of these companies was identified as Arena Studios, Inc. a Manhattan business that at one time provided dominatrix services, the prosecutor said. Another source of straw buyers was a company called Maximum Restraint Films.

The high court on Thursday voided the convictions of many youth offenders who appeared before former Luzerne (loo-ZURN') County Judge Mark Ciavarella (shiv-uh-REL'-uh) from 2003 to 2008.

Federal prosecutors charged Ciavarella and another judge with taking $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in private lockups.

The judges pleaded guilty to fraud last month and face sentences of more than seven years in prison.

The juveniles whose records were expunged were low-level offenders who appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom without lawyers.

The case was turned over to the Los Angeles Superior Court jury Thursday after the prosecution concluded a rebuttal to the defense closing arguments.

Spector is being retried on a second-degree murder charge in the shooting of actress Lana Clarkson six years ago.

His first trial ended in a jury deadlock in 2007 with the majority favoring conviction. This time the jury has the option of considering a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter.

Clarkson died of a gunshot fired inside her mouth as she sat in the foyer of Spector's home. The 40-year-old star of the cult film "Barbarian Queen" had met Spector hours earlier at her job as a hostess at the House of Blues.

The brother of convicted Ponzi scheme mastermind Bernard Madoff had his assets frozen by a New York state judge as part of a $2 million lawsuit filed by an investor who lost $470,000 in Madoff’s fraud.

New York Supreme Court Justice Stephen Bucaria yesterday signed an order temporarily freezing assets of Peter Madoff, who was chief compliance officer of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, according to a copy of the order. Bucaria will hold a hearing on April 3 in Nassau County.

Peter Madoff served as trustee for a $470,000 inheritance that 22-year-old law student Andrew Samuels received in 2003, his father, Howard Samuels, said in an interview. The judge issued the order in a lawsuit filed yesterday by the younger Samuels, who is suing Peter Madoff for $2 million for breaching his fiduciary duty by investing his inheritance with Bernard Madoff.

“All of his assets” are frozen, Howard Samuels said. “Everything.”

The order prohibits Peter Madoff, who lives in Old Westbury, New York, on Long Island, from removing, transferring or encumbering any funds or property and requires him to disclose all assets he owns. Andrew Samuels’ lawyer, Steven Schlesinger, said the freeze order reaches all of Madoff’s assets.

The vouchers have helped cover the cost of private school for foster children and disabled students. The justices ruled Wednesday that the programs run afoul of the Arizona Constitution's bans on using tax dollars to support private schools.

Lower courts had split on the issue.

Arizona's high court previously upheld another state effort to help defray the costs of private-school education. In 1999 it said an income tax credit for individuals making donations for private school scholarships was constitutional.