Regina Schenck, 46, of Herald, a small community in southern Sacramento County, is headed to prison for three years and five months, the sentenced handed down for her stealing $1.3 million from her employer, Sacramento law firm Diepenbrock Harrison.

She was also ordered to repay the $1.3 million to her former employer plus $264,000 in restitution to the IRS. She pleaded guilty on Sept. 1.

Between 2003 and 2008, Ms. Schenck wrote law firm checks to pay her own bills, created false documents, and told lies to cause law firm partners to authorize checks that she secretly used to buy five horses and a horse trailer, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Segal, who prosecuted the case.

She also used the law firm’s computer network to inflate her salary, give herself bonuses and benefits, and she omitted her fraud-procured income from her tax return, prosecutors say.

A federal appeals court in New York says the CIA did not violate Valerie Plame's free speech rights.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 2007 lower court decision in its ruling Thursday. The decision barred Plame from revealing the length of her tenure with the CIA in a memoir.

The appeals court agreed that the agency made a good argument to keep the information secret.

Plame's identity was revealed in a syndicated newspaper column in 2003 after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, began criticizing the war in Iraq.

She and her publisher sued the CIA in 2007. They claimed they had a First Amendment right to publish her dates of employment.

Scott Rothstein, the Florida lawyer whose firm asked U.S. prosecutors to investigate the alleged disappearance of $500 million in investor funds, was accused in a government filing of conducting a “Ponzi” scheme.

Acting U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Sloman in Miami is seeking the civil forfeiture of eight properties linked to the lawyer.

“There is probable cause to believe that the above- described defendant properties were acquired in connection with a ‘Ponzi’ scheme, conducted by attorney Scott Rothstein” and others, according to Sloman’s filing yesterday in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The law firm, Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler PA, asked U.S. prosecutors to investigate the possible misappropriation of funds, the firm’s attorney, Kendall Coffey, said in a Nov. 3 interview.

Rothstein, the Fort Lauderdale-based firm’s co-founder, is believed to have taken the funds from a side business that dealt in legal-case settlements, Coffey said then.

Investors were allegedly being enticed to invest in pay-out plans for settlements that didn’t actually exist, prosecutors said. The payments were scheduled over as many as 12 months.

“The entire investment scheme was a fraud,” Sloman’s office said in the court document. Some of the investor proceeds were used to acquire the properties now sought by the U.S., all of which are located in Florida.

The Supreme Court is considering whether sentencing a juvenile to life in prison with no chance of parole is cruel and unusual punishment, particularly if the crime is less serious than homicide.

The cases being heard Monday involve two Florida convicts. Joe Sullivan was sent away for life for raping an elderly woman when he was 13. Terrance Graham was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17.

Graham, now 22, and Sullivan, now 33, are in Florida prisons, which hold more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

Lawyers for Graham and Sullivan argue that it is a bad idea to render a final judgment about people so young.

The U.S. Supreme Court is taking a close look at a question individual investors have long asked about their mutual funds, but the courts have largely ignored: Why am I getting charged twice as much as big institutional clients?

Sure enough, the money-management services that different classes of fund clients get aren't the same. Institutions like pension funds and foundations may not need toll-free customer hotlines. They don't require as many of the prospectuses and other fund reports that individuals often throw away, even though they're printed and mailed at great expense. Individuals move relatively paltry sums in and out of a fund, piling up higher transaction costs than big clients.

Still, the investments a fund makes are often the same for both groups, and the returns similar — though individuals' higher fees take a bigger bite from their results, regardless of whether markets are up or down.

So it can be galling for an individual to pay an expense ratio of, say, 1 percent of cash invested as an annual fee, versus 0.5 percent for an institutional client enjoying what is in effect a bulk rate.

Courts have been reluctant to consider such disparities, and have rarely sided with investors. Instead, the comparisons that courts have allowed focus on whether a fund's fees are so far out of line from what similar competing funds charge as to be unreasonable.

Hidden data embedded in electronic public records must be disclosed under Arizona's public records law, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a case that attracted interest from media and government organizations.

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision overturned lower courts' rulings and is one of the first decisions by a state appellate court on whether a public records law applies to so-called "metadata" — data about data.

Metadata can show how and when a document was created or revised and by whom. The information isn't visible when a document is printed on paper nor does it appear on screen in normal settings.

"It would be illogical, and contrary to the policy of openness underlying the public records law, to conclude that public entities can withhold information embedded in an electronic document, such as the date of creation, while they would be required to produce the same information if it were written manually on a paper public records," Justice Scott Bales wrote.

A Washington state appellate court ruled last year that metadata in e-mail received by a city's deputy mayor was a public record under Washington's public records law.

An appeals court has upheld the conviction of British lawyer David Mills for accepting a bribe to lie in court to protect Silvio Berlusconi.

The decision Tuesday is a potential embarrassment for the Italian premier, whose trial in the same corruption case is expected to restart soon following an Italian high court's ruling that a law granting immunity to Italy's highest public officials is unconstitutional.

A lower court found Mills guilty of corruption in May and sentenced him to 4 1/2 years.

The judges ruled that Mills received $600,000 to give false testimony in two 1990s trials to shield Berlusconi and his Fininvest holding company from charges relating to the purchase of U.S. film rights.