Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens said he understood it might look bad to jurors if he leaves court in the opening days of trial. But his attorney said his Senate duties took priority.

"There's only one thing more important in his life than this trial, and that's doing his duty as a senator, particularly in this time of national crisis," attorney Brendan Sullivan said.

Stevens is charged with lying about more than $250,000 in home repairs and other gifts he received from an oil contractor. The trial comes at a difficult time in his political career: He is fending off a strong Democratic challenge to his seat and is tethered to a courtroom during the height of campaign season.

Being absent as Congress considers a historic $700 billion bailout of the financial market could make it look like the corruption charges have made it impossible for Stevens to do his job.

It's unclear when Stevens might have to leave court. Jury selection was scheduled to conclude Wednesday morning and opening statements are scheduled for Thursday. Capitol Hill lawmakers, meanwhile, are under pressure to pass a bailout package quickly.

The Bush administration wants quick passage of legislation that would allow the government to buy bad mortgages and other troubled assets from banks shaken by the mortgage and banking crisis.

Prosecutors didn't oppose Stevens' plan to leave court but they said Stevens shouldn't be able to use the crisis to cast himself as a dedicated senator in front of jurors. The judge said Stevens could leave court but jurors would not be told why.

The court on Wednesday refused to hear Sprint's appeal of a March ruling by the Appellate Court of Illinois that would require Overland Park, Kan.-based Sprint to dismantle its Nextel network in regions of the Midwest.

Schaumburg, Ill.-based iPCS sells Sprint-branded services. It sued Sprint after Sprint acquired Nextel Communications Inc. in 2005, saying that it was violating iPCS' exclusivity agreement by selling Nextel products in its territory.

A Cook County judge sided with iPCS in 2006, ordering Sprint to divest itself of its Nextel holdings in the affiliate's territory.

The Senate's longest-serving Republican, Stevens is fighting charges that he lied about more than $250,000 in home repairs and other gifts he received from an oil contractor. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan warned the Alaska senator that leaving court might hurt him in the eyes of jurors.

Stevens said he understood.

"There's only one thing more important in his life than this trial, and that's doing his duty as a senator, particularly in this time of national crisis," defense attorney Brendan Sullivan said.

The trial comes at a difficult time in Stevens' political career. He is fending off a strong Democratic challenge to his seat and, during the height of campaign season, Stevens is tethered to a courtroom in Washington.

Being absent as Congress considers a historic $700 billion bailout of the financial market could make it look like the corruption charges have made it impossible for Stevens to do his job.

Prosecutors didn't oppose Stevens' plan to leave court but they said Stevens shouldn't be able to use the crisis to cast himself as a dedicated senator in front of jurors. The judge said Stevens could leave court but jurors would not be told why.

Jury selection continued Tuesday and opening arguments were scheduled to begin as early as Wednesday morning.

The first trial began Sept. 8 and involves John "Jay" Brooks, a millionaire businessman accused of orchestrating the 2005 kidnapping and murder of someone whom Brooks believed had stolen from him.

In the other case, jury selection was to begin Monday in the trial of Michael "Stix" Addison, who is charged with fatally shooting a Manchester police officer in 2006.

Death penalty opponents hope the simultaneous trials will focus attention on their cause, though they aren't planning another attempt to repeal the state's capital murder law when the Legislature convenes in January.

Both the House and Senate voted to repeal the death penalty in 2000, but then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen vetoed the bill. Last year, under the threat of a veto from Gov. John Lynch, the bill failed by 12 votes in the House.

New Hampshire's narrow capital murder law applies to a half dozen crimes, including killing a police officer, murder for hire and killing during a kidnapping. Prisoners who kill another while serving a life sentence, murder during a rape, and certain drug crimes also qualify.

The Georgia Supreme Court's unanimous ruling rejected arguments for a new trial from attorneys representing James Sullivan, who is serving life in prison for paying a hit man $25,000 to gun down Lita Sullivan.

The appeal was a last-ditch attempt to toss a 2006 murder conviction against Sullivan. A man carrying a dozen long-stemmed roses shot Lita Sullivan on the doorstep of her Atlanta town house in 1987, on the day of a hearing to discuss property distribution in the couple's divorce.

Her death — and the 19-year effort to prosecute her killer — is one of the most high-profile cases in modern Atlanta history.

James Sullivan's attorneys had argued that a search warrant used to get crucial evidence from Sullivan's $5 million Florida mansion was full of omissions and half-truths and relied on testimony from a confidential informant who had been arrested 38 times. The search yielded a diary and financial documents used in Sullivan's trial.

Prosecutors defended the affidavit as "truthful and complete with the best information at the time." They said there was ample reason to search Sullivan's home even without the informant's testimony.

In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Harold Melton, the court rejected Sullivan's claims.

"This evidence was sufficient to enable the jury to determine that (the) defendant was guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted beyond a reasonable doubt," he wrote.

The case has gone on for more than two decades. In 1992, a federal judge dismissed charges that Sullivan violated interstate commerce laws by arranging his wife's murder through long-distance phone calls. Lita Sullivan's parents later won a $4 million wrongful death lawsuit — which they say still hasn't been paid — but James Sullivan wasn't charged with his wife's murder until 1998.

That was when Belinda Trahan told authorities Sullivan paid her ex-boyfriend, a trucker named Phillip Anthony Harwood, $25,000 to kill Lita Sullivan. Harwood was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to a lesser crime.

Sullivan, who fled to Thailand after hearing of Harwood's arrest, was arrested four years later after a local resident spotted him on "America's Most Wanted."

Criticism of the Securities & Exchange Commission and its chairman, Christopher Cox, rose sharply on Sept. 18 as Republican Presidential candidate John McCain suggested he should be fired. "Mismanagement and greed became the operating standard while regulators were asleep at the switch," McCain said at a campaign appearance in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the President and has betrayed the public's trust. If I were President today, I would fire him."

While the comments sharply escalate public criticism of the SEC's role in the unfolding financial crisis, they echo complaints that have been building since Bear Stearns' collapse last spring, when Cox took heat for his apparent absence as other regulators and corporate chiefs drafted a rescue plan. Cox, formerly a representative from California, has been more visible in recent weeks, joining key weekend meetings with Federal Reserve officials and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—who has been careful to mention the involvement of Cox and the SEC—and issuing two statements saying the agency had "worked closely with regulators around the world…in the interest of orderly markets."

In a statement on the evening of Sept. 18, Cox defended his agency's actions during the financial crisis, saying it had taken multiple steps to curb short-selling, crack down on market manipulation, and share information with other regulators. "History will judge the quality of our response to this economic crisis, but now is not the time for those of us in the trenches to be distracted by the ebb and flow of the current election campaign," he said. "And it is precisely the wrong moment for a change in leadership that inevitably would disrupt the work of the SEC at just the wrong time."

Too Little, Too Late?

But critics argue that the agency has leaned toward a hands-off regulatory approach in recent years that has left it unprepared or unwilling to use the powers it has and slow to step in as trouble brewed. Too often, they say, it cracks down only after misdeeds have become blatant. "The SEC hasn't been leading the charge as much as they've been following it," says Howard Schiffman, a former SEC enforcement division attorney and partner at Schulte Roth & Zabel in Washington, D.C. "The house burns down and then they do a really good job to say, 'Whose fault is that?'" The philosophy in recent years, says Tamar Frankel, a Boston University law professor specializing in financial regulation, has been "to do as little as possible—the market will take care of it."

Supporters counter that the SEC's role is necessarily limited: It can't lend to struggling companies, and a balkanized regulatory structure spreads oversight of commercial banks, investment banks, mortgage lenders, and insurers across multiple state and federal agencies. Though the SEC is the primary regulator for broker-dealers—the operating units of the giant investment banks—it has less authority over their parent companies. So while it could demand that the broker-dealers stay adequately capitalized, it has little control over parent companies that have loaded up on risky investments.

"The one thing that's clear is that the SEC didn't cause these problems," says former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt. Rather, Congress, by failing to modernize financial regulation when it deregulated the financial-services industry in the 1990s, left the SEC and other regulators without the tools to regulate new markets and securities as they arose. "In essence what we have is a 21st century financial system and a 19th century regulatory system," Pitt said. That's a view shared by Richard Breeden, the SEC chairman under President George H.W. Bush. He argues that while "we will have to reexamine how permissive [the agency] had been" about the supercharged levels of leverage the investment banks have taken on, much of the current mess can't be laid at the SEC's feet.

An agency spokesman declined to respond to criticism of the agency's actions but pointed to congressional testimony from Cox last spring and over the summer. Cox has argued that the agency's narrow authority over broker-dealers meant it wasn't in a position to rein in the holding companies that owned them or limit the risks their investment strategies posed to the broader market. "These are considerations of systemic risk that extend far beyond the commission's mandate to protect investors," Cox testified to a congressional committee in April.

Criticized as Passive

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office who is now McCain's top economics adviser, says such arguments let the SEC off far too easily. He says the agency has failed in its most fundamental oversight and surveillance functions. "There is the basic issue of identifying institutions that are at risk," he says. "And the surveillance would appear to be severely impaired because we're having entities show up every day that are in desperate shape without any warning." As to Cox's argument that he didn't have enough authority to adequately regulate the firms as they grew far bigger, and more leveraged, in recent years, Holtz-Eakin is blunt: "Did he ever ask for it?" he says. "The flow-of-funds [numbers] suggest that we have become an incredibly leveraged nation in the eight years of the Bush Administration. Is there anything that suggests an adequate recognition of the increased leverage or rules to support it?"

Some former SEC staff and commissioners agree the agency could have done more, particularly in the months and years leading up to the current crisis. They point out that, while the SEC's direct regulatory authority over investment banks centers on the broker-dealer subsidiaries, the agency has expanded its influence over the holding companies in recent years. Since 2004, under an arrangement designed to make it easier for U.S. securities firms to operate in Europe, the SEC collects detailed financial data about a broker-dealer's holding company and its subsidiaries to assess the company's financial stability as a whole. "The aim," then-SEC Commissioner Annette Nazareth told a securities industry gathering in March 2007, "is to effectively monitor the holding company, and unregulated entities within the group, for financial and operational weaknesses that might place regulated entities or the broader financial system at risk.

"The commission has authority under [these] rules to take action in the event of a weakness or potential weakness." Nazareth, who left the SEC early this year, could not be reached for comment. With the information it collects about investment bank finances, the agency should have taken into account the growing risks as complex financial instruments proliferated, Schiffman argues. "Why haven't they been reevaluating that as the market became more and more and more leveraged?" he asks. John Coffee, a Columbia University securities law professor, notes that Lehman Brothers' (LEH) bankruptcy, along with deals to acquire Bear and Merrill Lynch (MER) as they struggled, mean just two major investment banks remain independent. "If 60% of the investment banks of any size have disappeared, I can't say the SEC is as good at prudential financial regulation as they are at disclosure and consumer regulation," Coffee says.

Questions also remain about whether the agency has taken advantage of all the tools at its disposal, particularly its ability to demand that publicly traded companies improve their financial disclosure if it is judged inadequate. Exhibit A: To this day, many investors still don't have a clear idea of just how leveraged financial-services companies have become, or how intertwined are their various market risks. While accounting rule makers determine what types of financial information companies must reveal, the SEC can require more. "That's the basic role of the SEC—disclosure," says Barbara Black, director of the University of Cincinnati's Corporate Law Center and editor of the Securities Law Prof Blog. "If [SEC officials] think there was not adequate disclosure of the risks, they could have compelled greater disclosure."