U.S. Chief District Judge Claire Eagan vacated the jury‘s ruling against Ford and ordered the case retried beginning July 16.

Brewster said Wednesday that Eagan‘s basis for the decision involved matters that Ford‘s attorneys didn‘t object to during the trial.

After a trial on the merits, for the reasons that follow, notwithstanding the compelling interest of Congress in protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web, I conclude today that COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) at least some of the plaintiffs have standing; (2) COPA is not narrowly tailored to Congress’ compelling interest; (3) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive, most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest; and (4) COPA is vague and overbroad. As a result, I will issue a permanent injunction against the enforcement of COPA.

The US Supreme Court in 2004 upheld a temporary injunction against the enforcement of COPA in Ashcroft v. ACLU, holding that COPA would likely violate the First Amendment, and remanded the case back to the District Court. Judge Reed presided over a four-week trial on the merits which concluded in November 2006.

COPA was enacted in 1998 after similar provisions contained in the Communications Decency Act (CDA) were struck down in Reno v. ACLU as unconstitutional because it was not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest and because less restrictive alternatives were available. Last year, Google fought a Justice Department subpoena seeking to force the search engine giant to hand over a large amount of user data, including one week's worth of query searches and up to 1 million web addresses as part of a federal effort to rewrite COPA. 

A federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed the conviction and sentence of a former Republican National Committee official accused in a phone-jamming plot on Election Day 2002.

James Tobin, the former regional chairman of President Bush ‘s re-election campaign, w, , ) defeated then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen for the Senate that day.

But the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that the statute under which Tobin was convicted "is not a close fit" for what Tobin did and questioned whether the government showed that Tobin intended to harass. A Justice Department spokesman said prosecutors were reviewing the decision, and did not say if they planned to appeal.

Messages seeking comment were left with Tobin and his attorneys.

At the time of the alleged phone jamming, Tobin was a regional official with the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, overseeing Senate campaigns in several states, including New Hampshire and Maine. He went on to serve as President Bush‘s New England re-election campaign chairman in 2004, but resigned after the phone-jamming allegations surfaced.

Tobin was convicted of putting the executive director of the state‘s Republican Party in touch with the head of a Virginia-based telemarketing firm, who hired another telemarketing firm to place the hundreds of hang-up calls. A co-owner of that firm at the time, Shaun Hansen, of Spokane, Wash., pleaded guilty in November to a conspiracy charge and to making the calls and awaits sentencing.

During arguments, the Missouri Attorney General argued that while the prosecutor's statements may have been improper, they did not influence the fairness of the guilt phase of Weaver's trial. Justice Souter seemed to agree with Weaver's counsel, indicating that some of the statements made by the prosecutor had no relationship to the facts and evidence presented during Weaver's trial; Justice Scalia noted that the guilt and sentencing phases of trials are "quite different."

A U.S. judge has thrown out a lawsuit challenging the fairness of how Web search leader Google Inc. calculates the popularity of Web sites in determining search results, court papers show.

In a ruling issued Friday that came to light Tuesday, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a lawsuit against Google by parenting information site KinderStart.

The judge also imposed yet-to-be-determined sanctions on KinderStart legal counsel Gregory Yu for making unsupported allegations against Google.

KinderStart sued Google in March 2006 alleging the Mountain View, California-based Internet company had defamed the site by cutting it from its Web search ranking system.

The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company, which features links to information about raising children, accused Google of violations of antitrust, free speech, unfair competition and defamation and libel laws.

In its suit, the company argued its site's sudden demotion in March 2005 to a "zero" ranking in Google's search system had severely harmed its business.

KinderStart had sought class action status on behalf of what is said were many other sites that suffered the same fate as Google fine-tunes Web site rankings in search results.

"KinderStart had failed to explain how Google caused injury to it by a provably false statement ... as distinguished from an unfavorable opinion about KinderStart.com's importance," the judge's ruling states.

In addition, the judge said the plaintiff's counsel should have removed allegations that Google discriminated against or manipulated its Web search rankings after the judge ordered the lawyer to do so in an interim ruling.

"While Yu has brought a novel challenge to a major corporation, it is apparent that to some extent he has overreached in doing so," Fogel said. "Yu had a professional responsibility to refrain from filing such allegations if he did not have appropriate supporting evidence."

The judge granted Google the right to seek attorneys fees for the costs of defending against these specific charges. Both sides have 14 days to file motions before the judge determines monetary damages against Yu.

Yu is with the firm Global Law Group of San Mateo.

"All options are being explored. That's all that we are going to say at this point," he told Reuters, but declined to describe his plans further.

A Google attorney said the company felt vindicated.

"We always felt these claims were unjustified, because courts have consistently rejected complaints over search engine rankings, so we're pleased that Judge Fogel promptly dismissed this case," Google litigation counsel Hilary Ware said in a company statement.

Harmon denied a motion in February, filed by defendants Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse, to delay the trial pending the outcome of the certification appeal to the Fifth Circuit. The case is still scheduled to resume on April 16. In January, Harmon dismissed seven defendants from the class action suit, including late ex-Enron CEO Ken Lay. Lay, convicted in May of fraud and conspiracy charges for providing investors with false and misleading financial information from 1999 up until Enron filed bankruptcy in late 2001, died suddenly of a heart attack in July.

The transcript released Monday was the fourth from the hearings the military is holding in private for 14 "high-value" terror suspects who were kept in secret CIA prisons before they were sent to the U.S. facility in Cuba last fall.

Last week, Waleed bin Attash said he helped plan the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200, according to the transcript. He also said he helped organize the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in which suicide bombers steered an explosives-laden boat into the guided-missile destroyer, killing 17 sailors.