A jury found a Chicago man guilty of abducting his ex-girlfriend and their four children and holding them hostage at an Elkhart motel.
 
The jury deliberated for two hours Wednesday before finding Jerry White, 31, guilty of one count of attempted murder and eight counts of criminal confinement.

White was accused of holding his former girlfriend, Kimberly Walker, and their four children hostage in Elkhart starting on Jan. 20. Police searched for them for more than three days until they found everyone unharmed at a motel on Elkhart's north side.

The case led to an Amber Alert that drew national attention.
White showed no emotion when the verdict was read. During his testimony, White said he never forced anyone to stay in the home and Walker and their four children went with him willingly to the motel where police later found them.

"They could've left if they wanted to," White said. "I never told anyone that they could not leave."

White also was charged with shooting a man after entering his former girlfriend's home. The man, Lathie Turnage, was blinded in the shooting. White said he shot Turnage out of fear.

White will be sentenced December 20. He faces up to 80 years in prison.
"I'm just glad it's over," said Pamela Walker, Kimberly's sister.

Neal Kuopus also passed on his right to a preliminary hearing, thereby sending the case closer to a trial date.

Kuopus appeared briefly in Alameda County Superior Court and let his attorney, deputy public defender Norma Rivera, speak for him.

Rivera asked him several questions to confirm that he understood he had a right to a preliminary hearing, where a judge must decide that a crime happened and that the defendant probably was involved.

The decision to skip the hearing was somewhat of a surprise, because according to court documents, Rivera and deputy district attorney Michael Roemer previously came to an agreement that Kuopus would plead guilty to one of the charges in exchange for a prison sentence of as many as three years, as well as five years of probation.

Rivera declined to comment on the case. Roemer said he could not comment specifically on the case, either.

Roemer said it has become more common to bypass a preliminary hearing.

Kuopus is accused of firing a gun at his ex-girlfriend several times Sept. 9 before escaping in the woman's truck. He was arrested three days later after a neighbor spotted him at his home.

He faces three felony counts of shooting into an occupied vehicle.

Police said Kuopus, 56, shot at the woman after she came to his home in the 4800 block of Mulqueeney Common to reclaim possession of her truck.

After an argument inside his home, police say, he followed her out as she got inside a vehicle with her friends. Both shots missed all three people inside, but one shattered a window.

No one was hurt and the victims were able to drive away and call police.

Kuopus is set to appear in court in Hayward Dec. 11 for an arraignment.

Circuit Court Judge Henry Lackey reported the "bribery overture" to federal authorities and agreed to assist investigators in an "undercover capacity," according to the indictment.

Scruggs was indicted along with three other attorneys, including his son, who is his law partner, and a former Mississippi auditor. They face charges including one count of defrauding the federal government and two counts of wire fraud.

"I'm convinced that these guys did not do what they're accused of doing," said Joey Langston, a lawyer for Scruggs' firm.

Also named as defendants in the indictment are Zach Scruggs; Sidney Backstrom, a lawyer in Scruggs' firm; Timothy Balducci, a New Albany, Miss.-based lawyer; and former state auditor Steven Patterson, who works with Balducci.

Patterson resigned as auditor in 1996 after he was accused of lying on state documents to avoid paying taxes on a car tag.

Scruggs turned himself in to authorities Wednesday afternoon at a federal building in Oxford, Miss., where the grand jury handed up the indictments earlier in the day, Langston said.

After their arraignment Wednesday, Richard Scruggs was released on $100,000 bail, while Zach Scruggs and Patterson each were freed on $50,000 bail. Langston said Backstrom is expected to be arraigned Thursday, but he couldn't say when Balducci is expected to appear in court.

Langston said it was too early for him to comment on the details of the allegations.

"Right now, we've just got to get our arms around it," he said.

Richard Scruggs, whose brother-in-law is Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., earned millions from asbestos litigation and from his role in brokering a multibillion-dollar settlement with tobacco companies in the mid-1990s.

His case against the tobacco companies was portrayed in the 1999 movie "The Insider," starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.

After Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, the Gulf Coast native sued insurers on behalf of hundreds of policyholders whose claims were denied after the storm.

On Tuesday, FBI agents searched Scruggs law offices and left with copies of computer hard drives, Langston said.

The alleged bribery scheme stems from a lawsuit filed in March against Scruggs by a Jackson, Miss., law firm, Jones, Funderburg, Sessums, Peterson & Lee in a dispute over $26.5 million in attorneys' fees.

Scruggs created a legal team called the Scruggs Katrina Group to represent policyholders who sued their insurers after the hurricane.

In January, Scruggs' legal team reached a mass settlement of suits with State Farm Insurance Cos. that involved more than $26 million in lawyers' fees.

The lawsuit accuses Scruggs of trying to "freeze out" lawyers from the Jackson law firm, including senior partner John G. Jones, and pay it a "ridiculously low figure" for its "substantial" work.

After the suit was filed, Balducci is accused of having several meetings and conversations with Lackey in which Balducci agreed to pay the judge for ruling in favor of Scruggs in the case, according to the indictment.

Scruggs allegedly tried to cover up the scheme by falsely creating documents that showed he hired Balducci to work on an unrelated case, when he was actually reimbursing him for the cash bribes, the indictment said.

The indictment includes excerpts of telephone conversations between Balducci and the judge that were presumably recorded by federal authorities.

A 40 percent contingency fee negotiated by a Manhattan law firm retained by the widow of a real estate developer involved in a multimillion-dollar estate dispute was not "unconscionable on its face," an appeals court ruled yesterday.

The court said that "at first blush," the 40 percent fee — worth about $42 million — that was claimed by the law firm, Graubard Miller, from Alice Lawrence, the 83-year-old widow of the real estate developer Sylvan Lawrence, "might arguably seem excessive and invite skepticism."

But a majority of the five-member panel of the court, the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, ruled that whether the fee was reasonable should be determined at a trial, based on a further exploration of the discussions that led to the fee agreement and the difficulty of the case.

In a dissent, one justice, James M. Catterson, called the fee "exorbitant." He said that the retainer agreement was signed when a $60 million settlement offer was already on the table.

The estate was settled just five months later for more than $100 million, the judge said, meaning that the law firm's fee was almost equal to the additional amount it won.

Mark Zauderer, a lawyer for the firm, said in a telephone interview that Graubard Miller was delighted with the decision, which was issued in response to Mrs. Lawrence's appeal of two decisions in Surrogate's Court.

Mr. Zauderer said that the fee had been justified by the law firm's success in winning about $115 million for Mrs. Lawrence against Seymour Cohn, her husband's brother, business partner and executor — against an adversary who, he said, was "extremely wealthy and well defended."

"What the courts recognize is that a fee agreement is not unconscionable simply because it can produce a big fee," Mr. Zauderer said. "You have to look at the value rendered to the client."

Leslie Corwin, Mrs. Lawrence's current lawyer, said there was a "strong possibility" that she would seek to have the Court of Appeals hear the case.

Mr. Lawrence died in 1981. At the time, he and his brother owned "more than 90 commercial buildings and parcels of real estate," the dissent said. Mrs. Lawrence wanted to sell them. Mr. Cohn, who died in 2003, opposed her.

"This is now the third time a court or a judge has affirmed the right of the Graubard firm to be paid a well-earned fee in which it got a tremendous result in a highly complex case," Mr. Zauderer said.

A preliminary approval hearing was scheduled for Monday, Kinley said, but declined to estimate the cost to Ford.

The settlement applies to about 1 million people in California, Connecticut, Illinois and Texas, according to the Associated Press, which cited Kevin Roddy, a New Jersey attorney and co-counsel for the SUV owners who brought the lawsuit.

The attorney, who could not immediately be reached, told the AP that the settlement would be filed later on Wednesday in Sacramento County Superior Court. It will allow vehicle owners to apply for $500 vouchers to buy new Explorers or $300 vouchers to buy other Ford or Lincoln Mercury products.

The settlements apply to Explorers from model years 1991 through 2001, Roddy said in the report.

Paul Stern argued that his state, like many others, is trying to keep tobacco from underage smokers and that cannot be done without the help of companies that deliver cigarettes bought over the Internet.

Congress has encouraged the states "to deal with the significant public health problem of youth access to tobacco," Stern told the court, arguing for Maine's right to regulate shipment of cigarettes bought online.

Shipping industry associations that are challenging the law object to delivery requirements that they say only the federal government can impose.

Federal law bars states from regulating prices, routes or services of shipping companies and Maine's law "certainly relates to the service" of the shipping companies, Chief Justice John Roberts said.

"It talks about what carriers have to do," Roberts added.

Recent research says children as young as age 11 were successful more than 90 percent of the time in buying cigarettes over the Internet. At last count, there were 772 Internet cigarette vendors, a nearly nine-fold increase in seven years, according to Kurt Ribisl, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina's school of public health who has spent the past eight years studying the issue.

In 2002, at the start of the boom in Internet cigarette sites, a study found that Internet vendors sold 400 million packs of cigarettes a year, 2 percent of the cigarettes consumed in the United States and a figure that anti-smoking groups say is growing.

The case also involves the issue of uncollected state taxes. One study found that three-quarters of Internet tobacco sellers say they will not report cigarette sales to tax collection officials. A private research firm found states lose as much as $1.4 billion annually in uncollected tobacco taxes through Internet sales.

The lost revenue is a concern to Maine and about 40 other states that have tried to prohibit or severely restrict the direct delivery of tobacco products to consumers.

The differences in the state laws are a burden to business, several justices suggested.

"What if every state enacted a slightly different law relating to this and a slightly different law relating to every other product that they might want to restrict for health or safety reasons?" asked Justice Samuel Alito.

Justice Stephen Breyer said it would be a "nightmare" if every state were to pass a different law on what it takes to prove that a shipping company knowingly delivered an unlicensed product.

To Justice David Souter, the federal ban on state regulation of interstate shipping was intended "to end the economic effects of state patchwork transportation regulation."

If Maine's tobacco delivery law is not tossed out, "there will be different delivery laws in states across the country, and that patchwork will eliminate the efficiency and the cost savings that was Congress' intent," said lawyer Beth Brinkmann, arguing for the transportation associations.

Maine says delivery companies must check packages against a list from the state of known unlicensed tobacco retailers. The shipping companies must deliver only to the person to whom the package is addressed and a recipient under 27 must present identification before the package can be delivered.

Facing legal trouble in New York state in 2005, United Parcel Service Inc. agreed to stop shipping cigarettes to individual consumers in all 50 states. The company says it did so because of the varying state laws. FedEx and DHL have signed similar agreements.

Two lower federal courts have rejected Maine's law. The Supreme Court is expected to rule in the case by next June.

The case is Rowe, v. New Hampshire Motor Transport Association, 06-457.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, a presidential candidate and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said: "Most often, individuals are forced into bankruptcy by a devastating medical event or the loss of a job."

The Connecticut Democrat said his bill would allow judges to consider the individual circumstances of debtors in bankruptcy cases so that families and children are protected.

The bill would ensure that medical debts can always be discharged in bankruptcy and that mortgages can be restructured to help borrowers stay in their homes, he said.

Student loans would also be dischargeable under the bill, and child support and alimony payments would be settled first.

"Our bankruptcy laws should not punish these vulnerable members of our society, but instead should help them get back on their feet while protecting them and their families from added suffering at the hands of creditors," Dodd said.

The bill would seek to undo some aspects of bankruptcy reform passed in 2005, which Dodd said he opposed at the time.

Some of Dodd's Senate colleagues and lawmakers in the House of Representatives have sponsored their own versions of bankruptcy reform, but no single bill has won widespread support.

Last month, the House Judiciary Committee debated but could not pass a far-reaching measure that would let bankruptcy judges erase mortgage debt.