A jury convicted Mark Jensen last week of killing Julie Jensen on Dec. 3, 1998, in their Pleasant Prairie home. Some jurors cited the letter as a key piece of evidence.

Julie Jensen left the note with a neighbor to give to police if something happened to her.

"I pray that I am wrong and nothing happens, but I am suspicious of Mark's suspicious behaviors and fear for my early demise," Julie Jensen wrote in the letter. She said she refused to leave because of their two young sons.

Mark Jensen, her husband of 14 years, claimed she was depressed, committed suicide and framed him. At the time, Mark Jensen was having an affair with a woman he has since married.

He faces a mandatory penalty of life in prison during sentencing, set for Wednesday. The judge was to determine if he should ever be eligible for parole.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a California case with similar elements in April. Legal experts say if the court overturns that conviction, it could pave the way for Mark Jensen to get a new trial.

"It would surprise me if he didn't get a new trial based on that," said Phillip A. Koss, a University of Wisconsin-Madison adjunct professor and Walworth County district attorney.

Mark Jensen, now 48, was charged with first-degree murder in 2002, but legal wrangling over evidence delayed the trial repeatedly.

The evidence included the letter, as well as Julie Jensen's statements to police, a neighbor and her son's teacher about her suspicions.

"The economic situation has become distinctly less favorable" since the summer, the Fed chief told the House Financial Services Committee, a sign markets took to be evidence of yet more interest rate cuts by the U.S. central bank which pushed the euro higher.

Lower interest rates can jump-start a nation's economy, but may weigh on its currency as traders transfer funds to countries where they can earn higher returns.

Shortly after his testimony, the euro surged to a record $1.5105 before falling back slightly to $1.5043 in afternoon trading, from the $1.4967 it bought in late trading Tuesday in New York.

The surging euro makes it more expensive for Americans visiting Europe, but makes U.S. shopping more appealing to Europeans.

Since Bernanke's last such assessment last summer, the housing slump has worsened, credit problems have intensified and the job market has deteriorated. Bernanke said that the confluence of these factors has turned people and businesses alike toward a more cautious attitude toward spending and investment.

This, he said, has further weakened the economy.

That is in contrast to Europe where, despite the roaring euro, growth is still on track, albeit slightly slower, and markets are optimistic that should the U.S. go into recession, the continent would be able to weather any such slowdowns.

The European Central Bank, which has left its own rates unchanged since last summer, is expected to keep them at 4 percent when it meets next week.

Carol A. Hyde, a founding partner of Iseman, Cunningham, Riester & Hyde, LLP, a law firm with offices in Poughkeepsie and Albany, was elected the firm’s first managing partner at the partners’ annual planning retreat held in January.

The firm was formerly managed by a three-person executive committee.
Hyde practices in the areas of health care and business transactions.

A native of Michigan, Hyde earned her general studies degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and graduated magna cum laude from Albany Law School of Union University, where she was co-valedictorian of her class.

Two Richmond law firms are expanding their reach through a merger.

LeClairRyan and Wright Robinson Osthimer & Tatum are planning to merge March 31 in a deal that will broaden their national scope and add to their capacity to handle large, complex cases, partners with the firms said yesterday.

The combined firm will use the LeClairRyan name, and no job cuts are expected.

LeClairRyan said the merger would expand its litigation practice in product liability, construction, employment and the aviation industry, and provide its clients more representation on the East and West coasts.

"It gives us a greater depth and breadth of services," said Gary D. LeClair, the firm's chairman and chief executive officer.

Founded in 1988, the firm has 220 lawyers and about 225 other staff members at several offices in Virginia and in Boston; Philadelphia; Newark, N.J.; Washington; New York; and Rochester, N.Y.

Wright Robinson Osthimer & Tatum has 50 lawyers and 50 other staff members, as well as about 120 contract lawyers in the Richmond area. The firm, founded in 1986, has offices in Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington.

It also has built a practice in "discovery solutions," which involve litigation that includes millions of pages of documents or large amounts of data that require technological solutions to organize.

"We were one of the first firms in the country to really have a standardized practice group to do this," said Mark Yacano, a principal at Wright Robinson. "One of the driving reasons for this merger was the fact that LeClairRyan wanted to partner with us to continue to grow it."

The discovery solutions practice is at the firm's office on East Franklin Street in Richmond. It will stay there, while some Wright Robinson Osthimer & Tatum lawyers will move to LeClairRyan's offices in Riverfront Plaza.

Today, domain hunter Chris McElory chucked a federal class action lawsuit at Network Solutions, insisting that the Comcast of domain registrars uses "fraudulent and deceptive business practices to effectively trap consumers into paying its grossly inflated domain name registrations fees".

In the words of Brian Kabateck, one of McElory's lawyers, Network Solutions is guilty of "a very sophisticated form of price fixing". We take issue with the "very sophisticated" bit.

If you visit the Network Solutions website and show interest in a domain without actually putting your money down, the company will quickly register the address under its own name. For the next four days, you can still purchase the address from Network Solutions, but you can't purchase it from any other registrar.

Back in January, for instance, one loyal Reg reader searched the site for "network-solutions-registers-all-names-searched.com," and minutes later, he discovered that "network-solutions-registers-all-names-searched" belonged to none other than Network Solutions. Meanwhile, other readers have pulled this trick with domain names that describe the company's behavior in very different terms.

Though it won't speak to us, Networks Solutions tells others that by self-registering domains, it's protecting customers from cybersquatters on the lookout for highly marketable urls. "In response to customer concerns about Domain Name Front Running (domains being registered by someone else just after they have conducted a domain name search)," the company has said, "we have implemented a security measure to protect our customers."

So, Network Solutions is front running domains in an effort to prevent other outfits from front running. And judging from a recent ICANN study, those other outfits don't exist.

And even if they do exist, Network Solutions' little trick doesn't prevent them from front-running. It merely forces them to spend their dirty dollars with Network Solutions. Network Solutions claims that it would never sell domains to front runners, but we question its ability to identify front runners. After all, it has failed to identify itself.

The company claims that these mysterious front runners are also "domain tasters," those clever characters that temporarily register thousands of domains just to test their "marketability." And it wants the world to know that if ICANN would just prevent people from returning addresses within five days for a full refund, it will quit self-registering domains.

But this is merely stating the obvious. If ICANN removes the five-day full refund, Network Solutions couldn't self register domains without paying good money for them. And it won't pay good money for them.

As Chris McElory's suit says, Network Solutions' self-registering trick is merely an effort to make some extra dough. If customers search on a name but don't immediately buy, his complaint says, they "cannot register their domain name through any of Network Solutions' less expensive competitors because their chosen domain is unavailable through any other service - which (unbeknownst to the customer) is now held exclusively by Network Solutions - who is now offering to sell the domain to anyone willing to pay its grossly inflated registration fee."

The suit even goes so far as to say that Network Solutions isn't the only guilty party. ICANN is also named. "ICANN rules tacitly say that Network Solutions practice is acceptable," Kabateck told us. "We aren't seeking damages against ICANN. We just want a declaration from the court that its allowing this to go on."

What does Kabateck think of Network Solutions' claim that it's merely trying to destroy domain tasters? "Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't get," he says. And we can assure you he's not stupid.

A federal jury in Kansas City, Kan., ruled against Mendelsohn after a judge excluded the testimony of five ex-employees from other departments at Sprint headquarters who claimed they had been released because of their age. Lawyers refer to such testimony as "me, too" evidence.

Sprint let Mendelsohn go in 2002 amid companywide layoffs that eventually numbered more than 14,000. She was part of the company's business development strategy group, which was scaled back from 75 employees to 57.

The supervisor who laid off Mendelsohn said she was the weakest performer in his unit.

Sprint's lawyers argued in Supreme Court that if a different supervisor at a company harbors bias, that's unfortunate, but it is not relevant to the claim by the person who filed the lawsuit. Sprint argued that such information unfairly prejudices a jury against a company.

The Bush administration took a middle ground between Sprint and Mendelsohn, saying evidence of age bias is sometimes admissible when it is committed by other supervisors at the same company. It cited as an example another supervisor dismissing an employee, saying the company is on a youth campaign.

In Mendelsohn's case, none of the five employees who would have testified on her behalf was laid off by Mendelsohn's supervisor and none worked in her business development group. The five were laid off as many as nine months before Mendelsohn and as many as three months after.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver sent the case back for a new trial, saying the testimony of the five ex-employees supported an alleged companywide age discriminatory scheme.

But mostly, people in Cordova talk about the discouraging wait for legal retribution for the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

It's been almost 19 years since the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground at Alaska's Bligh Reef, spurting 11 million gallons of crude into the rich fishing waters of Prince William Sound. In 1994, an Anchorage jury awarded victims $5 billion in punitive damages. That amount has since been cut in half by other courts on appeals by Exxon Mobil Corp.

Now the town of 2,200 looks anxiously to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear arguments Wednesday from Exxon on why the company should not have to pay punitive damages at all.

Scores of Cordova residents are among almost 33,000 plaintiffs — including commercial fishermen, Alaska Natives, landowners, businesses and local governments — who could see the $2.5 billion judgment taken away by the high court.