Without comment, the justices declined to consider whether the jury foreman's conduct violated the rights of Jimmie Lucero, an Amarillo, Texas, man sentenced to death after being convicted in the shotgun slayings of three neighbors at their home in 2003.

The state of Texas argued that the Bible passage merely duplicated instructions of the trial court. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found the introduction of the Bible into the jury room to be "harmless error."

A Texas jury took about five hours to decide on the death penalty for Lucero.

The two jurors who switched their votes said the reading of the scripture and its content had no impact on their votes.

During deliberations, the foreman read aloud from Romans 13:1-6, which states that everyone must submit to authority and that those who do wrong should be afraid, for a ruler is "God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment to the wrongdoer."

Lucero was convicted in the killings of 71-year-old Pedro Robledo, his 72-year-old wife, Maria, and their daughter, Fabiana, 31.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday that Sheik Mohammed Ali Al-Moayad and Mohammed Mohsen Zayed, convicted of supporting terrorists, can have new trials. The three-judge panel took the unusual step of ordering the transfer of the case to a new judge.

The men were convicted in federal court in Brooklyn after a six-week trial in early 2005 on charges of conspiring to support al-Qaida and Hamas, supporting the Palestinian group and attempting to support al-Qaida. Their trial featured testimony by an FBI informant who set himself on fire outside the White House, saying he wanted more money from the FBI.

Al-Moayad, 60, was sentenced to 75 years in prison. Zayed, 34, was sentenced to 45 years.

The appeals court said the defendants were prejudiced by testimony from a Scottish law student who told of a deadly suicide bombing on a bus in Tel Aviv and by an American citizen of Yemeni heritage who attended an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan in 2001.

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati denied the Ohio GOP's request that, at the very least, ballots cast during the weeklong period be segregated from other ballots cast for the Nov. 4 presidential election.

A federal district judge in Columbus declined to rule on the matter Monday. The Ohio Supreme Court upheld the early voting window in a 4-3 decision the same day, while a federal judge in Cleveland also sided with Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

The appeals court noted that the lower district court did not rule on the matter of the voting window, and said the argument involves facts about how election officials handle absentee ballots that must first be presented to a lower court.

Bill Todd, a lead attorney for the Ohio GOP, said the party was discussing its options Tuesday night. It wasn't known whether they planned to further appeal.

The appeals court also gave Brunner a second victory, rejecting a GOP challenge to her advisory that county boards of elections weren't required to allow poll observers during early voting.

A federal judge in Columbus issued a temporary restraining order against Brunner's instructions Monday. But the appeals court overturned that ruling, saying the district court had abused its discretion in granting the order.

Thousands of Ohioans went to the polls Tuesday for the first day of early voting. Ohio's largest counties had several hundred voters each, and a small portion of them also registered Tuesday.

Shell Oil Co. and the railroads — the Burlington, Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co. and the Union Pacific Railroad Co. — say they are being unfairly tagged with an inordinate portion of the cost of cleaning up the site.

The companies contend they merely transported and sold legal, useful products and were not involved in years of soil and groundwater contamination.

The site was once the home of a fertilizer and insecticides manufacturing facility.

But two recent critiques of his opinion in the landmark decision guaranteeing people the right keep guns at home for self-defense are notable because they come from respected fellow conservative federal judges.

The judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., and Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, take Scalia to task for engaging in the same sort of judicial activism he regularly disdains.

Wilkinson was interviewed by President Bush in 2005 for a Supreme Court vacancy. His article strongly suggests that the 5-4 decision in Heller v. District of Columbia would have come out differently if he had been chosen for the court. Bush's appointees to the high court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, joined Scalia's opinion.

The district's elected government is trying to figure out how to maintain restrictions on gun possession in the wake of the court ruling that struck down its 32-year-old ban on handguns. The D.C. council voted this month to let residents own most semiautomatic pistols and eliminate a requirement that guns be stored unloaded or secured with trigger locks.

Congressional critics said the city did not go far enough. The House passed a bill, backed by the National Rifle Association, that broadens the rights of city residents to buy and own firearms. The Senate has yet to act.

Wilkinson said elected officials are in a better position to determine gun laws than the courts. He compared the gun case to Roe v. Wade, the abortion rights decision that conservatives consider among the court's worst.

"Heller represents a triumph for conservative lawyers. But it also represents a failure — the Court's failure to adhere to a conservative judicial methodology in reaching its decision," Wilkinson wrote in an article to be published next year in the Virginia Law Review. "In fact, Heller encourages Americans to do what conservative jurists warned for years they should not do: bypass the ballot and seek to press their political agenda in the courts."

The guns case was easily the most significant opinion Scalia has written in his 22 years on the court. Yet Wilkinson faults the justice for falling victim to the same criticism Scalia leveled in a scathing dissent in the court's 1992 decision that reaffirmed the right to an abortion.

The 4-1 decision dated Wednesday and released Thursday upholds a lower court ruling that sided with Jennifer Henn and her former employer, the Times-Tribune of Scranton.

Two former Lackawanna County commissioners sued Henn and the paper over a January 2004 story that said they were not cooperative in their appearances before the grand jury.

The Supreme Court said reporters cannot be forced to identify confidential sources — a protection granted by the state's Shield Law.

Grand jury proceedings are secret and state law bars prosecutors, court officials or jurors from discussing such investigations. Witnesses are not barred from discussing their testimony outside the courtroom.

Lackawanna County Judge Robert A. Mazzoni had ruled that the importance of grand jury secrecy outweighed the protections of the Shield Law, but a three-judge Superior Court panel determined that Mazzoni had carved out an improper exception to the law. The high court agreed with the panel.

Democratic U.S. Rep. William Jefferson's attorney told a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that a congressional aide's testimony about Jefferson's leadership in passing trade legislation benefiting African nations violated the Constitution's speech or debate clause.

The clause says congressmen "shall not be questioned in any other Place" for speech or debate associated with their legislative actions. A federal judge in February refused to dismiss the indictment. Jefferson, who faces up to 235 years in prison if convicted of bribery and other charges, appealed.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Lytle told the appeals court judges that U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III got it right when he ruled that Jefferson's lawyers sought to apply the clause so broadly that it would make it virtually impossible to ever charge a congressman with a crime.

Jefferson's attorney, Robert P. Trout, contended the testimony about how the congressman gained influence with African leaders was at the heart of the government's case. Trout said one of the ways Jefferson gained that influence, according to grand jury testimony, was through leadership on the trade legislation.

The appeals court judges vigorously questioned Lytle and Trout for about 50 minutes, focusing on whether the indictment was tainted if prosecutors neither sought nor relied on the testimony cited by Jefferson.

Lytle said the aide volunteered the information in question, which amounted to just four lines in a massive set of grand jury transcripts.