A prosecutor wants federal prison time for a 75-year-old former lawyer who bilked his elderly clients of millions of dollars.

Gordon McGilton's spotless reputation as a volunteer, church member and veteran lawyer specializing in wills was exactly why people trusted him, Crown prosecutor Francois Drolet said yesterday. He said McGilton abused that trust by misappropriating $1.7 million of his elderly clients' money.

Defence lawyer Jeffrey Boro said his client has a heart condition and is legally blind, and asked that McGilton serve two years less a day under house arrest when he's sentenced on April 10. McGilton has had to sell his Westmount home and lives in a small apartment with his wife, Boro said.

McGilton transferred the stolen money to a company owned by his cousin who was investing in a bogus Nigerian oil investment.

A Seattle attorney has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of people who reported getting sick after eating contaminated peanut butter.

It's one of at least three lawsuits filed against ConAgra Foods, which is recalling all Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter made at its Sylvester, Georgia, plant.

Federal officials have linked the peanut butter to a salmonella outbreak that has sickened almost 300 people nationwide since August. No deaths have been reported.

The Seattle firm Marler Clark says it has been contacted by 25-hundred people. Attorney William Marler says the lawsuit seeks compensation for people who got sick, but were not hospitalized. Marler says the more-serious cases will be handled separately.

A ConAgra spokeswoman says the company takes consumer concerns seriously -- that's why it has recalled the peanut butter.

Mahala Ashley Dickerson, the state's first black lawyer, died Monday at her family homestead in Wasilla after a short illness. She was 94.

Dickerson, who was raised in the South before the era of civil rights, blazed a trail for black women in the world of law. Aside from her accomplishments in Alaska, she became the first female attorney in her home state of Alabama in 1948 and the second black woman admitted to the bar in Indiana in 1951. She was also the first black homesteader in the Mat-Su.

Attorney Rex Butler, whom Dickerson convinced to come to Anchorage, said, "I remember one lawyer telling me one time, he said, 'Rex, you see those mountains out there?' He said, 'Those mountains are littered with the bones of lawyers who underestimated M. Ashley Dickerson.' "

Dickerson had a reputation as an advocate for the poor and underprivileged. She argued many cases involving racial and gender discrimination, taking on the Anchorage Police Department and the University of Alaska, among other institutions.

"In my life, I didn't have but two things to do. Those were to stay black and to die. I'm just not afraid to fight somebody big," she told the Daily News in 1984, when, at age 71, she was still working 12-hour days at her Fairview law office. "Whenever there's somebody being mistreated, if they want me, I'll help them."

Dickerson grew up in Alabama on a plantation owned by her father. She attended a private school, Miss White's School, where she began a lifelong friendship with Rosa Parks, who would become a hero of the civil rights movement.

Dickerson graduated from Fisk University in 1935, married Henry Dickerson and had triplets, Alfred, John and Chris. She later divorced, and when the boys were 6, she went to Howard University School of Law, becoming one of four women to graduate in her class of '36. After working as an attorney in Alabama and Indiana, she moved to Alaska with her sons, where she homesteaded in the Valley.

"I didn't know a single person, and there were very few black people in Alaska then, but everyone welcomed me, white and black alike," she said in a 2001 interview.

Dickerson opened her law practice in Anchorage in 1959, and her name is still on the answering machine, along with that of her long-time law partner, Johnny Gibbons. In 1995, she was awarded the Margaret Brent Award from the American Bar Association, an honor also given to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O'Connor, a justice of the nation's top court who has since retired.

Dickerson wrote a book about her life, "Delayed Justice for Sale," in 1998. She continued to practiced law until she was 91.

In addition to encouraging Butler to practice in Anchorage, she was a mentor to many other young attorneys, Butler said.

Dickerson often took clients who didn't have the means to pay, said Leroy Barker, the historian for the Alaska State Bar Association, who practiced law with Dickerson in the 1960s.

"I don't think anybody thought of her as a black woman lawyer, she was just a lawyer," he said. "I think she worked very hard to get where she was, and she was a strong personality."

Joshua Wright, an Anchorage dentist, was a friend of Dickerson from the time she moved to Alaska. He remembered her as "a fighter."

"When she was younger, oh, God, when she got on a roll, you better clear out the room," he said, laughing.

He and his wife visited Dickerson over the weekend. She'd been lucid until a stroke a few weeks ago that left her without speech, he said. She responded to them in the room, he said, and when they left, she smiled and closed her eyes.

"That's our lasting picture of her," he said.

Dickerson's legacy will be the way she overcame obstacles, giving back to the community, said Celeste Hodge, former local head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who now runs Mayor Mark Begich's office of equal opportunity.

"Once you know her story, especially as an African-American woman, you know that you are able to achieve anything," Hodge said.

Dickerson will be buried on her land near her son, Alfred, who died in 1960. Sons John and Chris will attend a private Quaker graveside service today. A memorial will be held at a later date.

In one of the first ever extraditions for an intellectual property offense, the leader of one of the oldest and most renowned Internet software piracy groups was arraigned today in U.S. District Court, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg for the Eastern District of Virginia announced today.

Hew Raymond Griffiths, 44, a British national living in Bateau Bay, Australia, appeared today in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., before Magistrate Judge Barry R. Poretz. The defendant was extradited from Australia and is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of criminal copyright infringement. If convicted on both counts, Griffiths could receive a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. Prior to his arrival in the United States, he had spent nearly three years incarcerated at a detention center in Australia while fighting his extradition in Australian court.

“Griffiths claimed to be beyond the reach of U.S. law, and today, we have proven otherwise,” said Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher. “This extradition represents the Department of Justice’s commitment to protect intellectual property rights from those who violate our laws from the other side of the globe.”

“Our agents and prosecutors are working tirelessly to nab intellectual property thieves, even where their crimes transcend international borders,” said U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg.

The indictment, which was returned in March 2003, charges Griffiths with violating the criminal copyright laws of the United States as the leader of an organized criminal group known as DrinkOrDie, which had a reputation as one of the oldest security-conscious piracy groups on the Internet. DrinkOrDie was founded in Russia in 1993 and expanded internationally throughout the 1990s. The group was dismantled by the Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of Operation Buccaneer in December 2001, with more than 70 raids conducted in the U.S. and five foreign countries, including the United Kingdom, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Australia. To date, Operation Buccaneer has resulted in 30 felony convictions and 10 convictions of foreign nationals overseas. Prior to its dismantling, DrinkOrDie was estimated to have caused the illegal reproduction and distribution of more than $50 million worth of pirated software, movies, games and music.

“Counterfeiting and piracy of intellectual property are global parasites estimated to rob the legitimate world economy of more than $400 billion annually,” said Assistant Secretary Julie Myers. “The indictment charges that Griffiths was co-leader of DrinkOrDie, which was part of an underground online community that consisted of individuals and organized groups who used the Internet to engage in the large-scale, illegal distribution of copyright protected software, games, movies and music worth $50 million.”

According to the indictment, Griffiths, known by the screen nickname “Bandido,” was a longtime leader of DrinkOrDie and an elder in the highest echelons of the underground Internet piracy community, also known as the warez scene. He held leadership roles in several other well-known warez groups, including Razor1911 and RiSC. In an interview published in December 1999 by an online news source, he boasted that he ran all of DrinkOrDie’s day-to-day operations and controlled access to more than 20 of the top warez servers worldwide. In fact, Griffiths claimed to reporters that he would never be caught.

According to the indictment, Griffiths oversaw all the illegal operations of DrinkOrDie which specialized in cracking software and distributing the cracked versions over the Internet. Once cracked, these software versions could be copied and used without limitation. Members stockpiled the illegal software on huge Internet computer storage sites that were filled with tens of thousands of individual software, game, movie and music titles worth millions of dollars. The group used encryption and an array of other sophisticated technological security measures to hide their activities from law enforcement.

This case is being prosecuted by Deputy Chief Michael DuBose and trial attorney Jay Prabhu of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Wiechering of the Eastern District of Virginia.

The charges contained in the indictment are allegations only and the defendant is presumed innocent until convicted at trial.

Both Rodriguez and his company were indicted in November 2005 for violations related to the handling and transportation of hazardous waste. According to the indictment, Rodriguez and NAWA were hired to dispose of over of 155 gallon drums of construction-related waste. Approximately 75 of the drums contained expired petroleum-based concrete curing compound, which is an ignitable hazardous waste when disposal becomes necessary.

The indictment alleged that on or about March 27, 2002, Rodriguez and NAWA transported the drums using several Uniform Hazardous Waste Manifests that stated that the drums contained “Non-RCRA, Non-Regulated” waste. Rodriguez then made arrangements to transport the drums, for disposal, to landfills in Avalon, Texas, and Walterboro, S.C. that were not permitted under RCRA to accept hazardous waste. The drums of hazardous waster were then disposed of at unauthorized facilities.

Rodriguez faces a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison and a total maximum fine of $250,000 per count.

This case was investigated by Special Agents of the EPA, with the assistance of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and is being prosecuted by the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.

The Sacramento County Superior Court Tuesday struck down a plan by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to transfer prisoners to private out-of-state facilities in order to reduce prison overcrowding. The ruling by Judge Gail Ohanesian held that an emergency declaration issued by Schwarzenegger in October violated the California Emergency Services Act and the state constitution, which prohibits contracting with private companies to perform jobs usually held by state workers. Schwarzenegger announced his intent to appeal what he called the "disappointing ruling," warning that it could cause some prisoners to be released prematurely.

California has an estimated 174,000 prisoners held in facilities designed for 100,000. Last year, a federal judge ordered California to solve the crowding problem, vowing to release prisoners early if an adequate solution was not reached. Schwarzenegger issued the emergency proclamation in response. The California Department of Corrections began out-of-state transfers in November.

Federal investigators and prosecutors fudged data on the number of anti-terrorism investigations and cases for the four years after 9/11, according to an audit by US Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn A. Fine released Tuesday.

In a report on terrorism-related incidents and case-loads, the inspector general found that "some of these statistics were significantly overstated or understated." According to the audit, DOJ officials used non-terror-related immigration violations and drug trafficking to inflate the number of anti-terror cases reported.

The data was collected from multiple DOJ divisions, including the FBI, the Executive Office of US Attorneys, the Criminal Division, and the US Attorney's Office , and is used to monitor the DOJ's efficiency in fighting terrorism.