Whether Jackson has the discretion to ignore the guidelines is the issue before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

A companion case from Iowa also involves a judge's discretion to impose a more lenient sentence in a drug case, although Brian Gall pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ecstasy. In Gall's case, the judge decided probation was sufficient punishment even though the guidelines called for prison time.

Federal appeals courts threw out both sentences, but the justices accepted the defendants' appeals.

The Bush administration is supporting the appeals court rulings, while civil rights and advocacy groups are backing the defendants.

Congressional opponents of the laws establishing more severe sentencing for crack cocaine than powdered cocaine are racially discriminatory because they hit more directly at the black community, where this form of drug abuse is more commonplace.

Advocates for reducing the disparity point to crime statistics that show crack is more of an urban and minority drug while cocaine powder is used more often by the affluent. They say harsher penalties for crack cocaine unfairly punish blacks.

More than four-fifths of crack cocaine offenders in federal courts last year were black, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. By contrast, just over a quarter of those convicted of powder cocaine crimes last year were black, the commission said.

Kimbrough actually had much more powder than crack, but it was the latter that determined the length of his prison term.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond said judges are not free to impose sentences shorter than the guidelines "based on a disagreement with the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine offenses."

The crack-powder disparity grew out of a 1986 law that was passed in response to violent crimes committed to get money to feed crack habits.

The law includes what critics have called the 100-to-1 disparity: Trafficking in 5 grams of crack cocaine carries a mandatory five-year prison sentence, but it takes 500 grams of cocaine powder to warrant the same sentence.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency within the U.S. judiciary, voted in May to reduce the recommended sentencing ranges for people convicted of crack possession, a step toward lessening the disparity. The recommendation will become effective Nov. 1 unless Congress acts.

At the same time, the commission urged Congress to repeal the mandatory prison term for simple possession and increase the amount of crack required to trigger obligatory five-year or more prison terms as a way to focus on major drug traffickers.

The Supreme Court gave a boost to judges' discretion when it ruled in 2005 that the sentencing guidelines are advisory, not mandatory. The guidelines were adopted in the 1980s to ensure comparable sentences for similar crimes from courtroom to courtroom.

The government insisted that Wyatt later took advantage of that relationship to secure the first contract under the oil-for-food program and to continue to receive oil deals after other American companies were denied access.

Wyatt's defense lawyers argued that their client was an American hero who never knowingly paid surcharges to the Iraqi government to win oil deals.

Wyatt made his early fortune in oil and eventually built a system to collect natural gas burned off in Texas oil wells, enabling him to sell the fuel to homeowners as far away as Utah, Michigan and New England.

Wyatt's ties to Utah run deeper than just selling natural gas. In the mid-1990s, he opposed an initiative put together by competing federal, state and private interests that called for conservation groups to purchase ranches in the Book Cliffs area of eastern Utah.

Those groups - in an effort to improve wildlife habitat and protect land from overgrazing - planned to turn the properties over to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the state's Division of Wildlife Resources.

The agencies would then agree to convert federal grazing permits to allow elk rather than cattle on the property.

Wyatt owned some of the ranchland and believed elk were eating forage that should have been feeding his 2,100 head of cattle. He challenged the initiative in court in an effort to outbid the DWR for the grazing permits. He eventually dropped his lawsuit, and the groups put together 500,000 acres for conservation.

A program to employ spy satellites for certain domestic uses has been postponed because of privacy concerns. Congress had already provided money for the program, which was to begin this month. But some lawmakers demanded more information about its legal basis and what protections there were to ensure that the government was not peering into the homes of Americans. As a result, the Homeland Security Department is not formally moving ahead with the program until it answers those questions, a department spokesman said.

The program would have expanded access to material gathered by satellites that monitor American territory to agencies involved in emergency response, border control and law enforcement. A new office within the Homeland Security Department, called the National Applications Office, would coordinate requests from civilian agencies for satellite information. Currently, civilian use of the material has generally been limited to monitoring weather and climate changes and to making maps.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, an opponent of the program, commended the department on Monday for its decision to "go back to the drawing board and get it right."

The department would not say how long it planned to postpone the program. "We are cooperatively working with the Congress to answer any questions that they have," said a spokesman, Andrew Lluberes. "We are totally confident that this is going to go forward."

Legal experts are watching this term to see the future direction of the highest U.S. court that has been closely divided, with a 5-4 conservative majority bolstered by President George W. Bush's two appointees -- Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

The court will rule on whether the hundreds of detainees at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba can use American courts to challenge their indefinite confinement and on the current lethal injection method of execution.

The term that ended in June was marked by a sharp shift to the right on divisive social issues like abortion and civil rights law. Legal experts are divided on whether the trend will continue this term, an issue already being discussed in the November 2008 presidential race.

ROMNEY WOULD NAME STRICT CONSTRUCTIONISTS

In Boston, Republican candidate Mitt Romney said cases this term could dramatically affect the "lives of all Americans" and he vowed to name justices "in the strict constructionist mold" of Roberts, Alito and their fellow conservatives, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.