This came as the high court on Wednesday upheld the conviction and sentence of Christopher Michael Dean, who was arrested for trying to rob a bank in Rome, Georgia, in 2004.

A gun went off accidentally during the attempted robbery when Dean tried to switch the weapon from one hand to the other. The discharge brought an automatic 10-year sentence for firing a weapon during a crime. Dean appealed, saying the automatic sentence shouldn't count since the firing of the gun was accidental.

Federal prosecutors said the law doesn't care why the gun went off, and the high court agreed.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who called it "the case of the bungling bank robber" in his bench statement, said the law "does not require that the discharge be done knowingly or intentionally."

If criminals want to avoid the penalty for accidental gunfire, they can "lock or unload the firearm, handle it with care during the underlying violent or drug trafficking crime, leave the gun at home or — best yet — avoid committing the felony in the first place," Roberts said.

Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer dissented, saying Congress intended the automatic sentence to only apply to intentional discharges of weapons.

It is the second major race case heard by the justices after Barack Obama became the nation's first black president.

The justices seemed split along conservative and liberal lines in considering a provision applying to all or parts of 16 states, mostly in the South. It requires them to get federal government approval before changing their voting procedures.

Congress adopted the Voting Rights Act, an historic piece of U.S. civil rights legislation, to make it easier for millions of blacks and other minorities to exercise their right to vote.

Congress extended it in 2006 for 25 years, with then-President George W. Bush signing it into law.

Last week the justices considered whether race still can be used as a factor for job promotions and hirings, an issue that could affect millions of employers nationwide.

Opponents of the voting rights law argue that the protections for minority voters are no longer needed after more than 40 years of progress, and they cite Obama's election as evidence of how America has changed since 1965.

That is the top recommendation in "Minor Crimes, Massive Waste: The Terrible Toll of America's Misdemeanor Courts," a report released Tuesday by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Researchers with the Defender Initiative at the Seattle University School of Law reviewed statistics and visited misdemeanor courts in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington state.

They reported that cases per public defender ranged from 360 a year in Benton County, Wash., and 380 in Seattle, both set limits, to 2,403 in Chicago, 2,502 in Utah and 18,720 in New Orleans.

The National Advisory Committee on Criminal Justice recommends a maximum of 400 cases a year per defender.

John Wesley Hall Jr., a lawyer from Little Rock, Ark., and president of the association, said he looked forward to presenting the findings to the House Judiciary Committee in a congressional hearing June 4.

The high court on Monday refused to hear James L. Andros III's appeal of a lower court decision throwing his lawsuit out.

Andros was arrested after an on-call medical examiner mistakenly listed the death of his wife, Ellen, as homicide through asphyxiation in 2001.

The charges were dropped a month before his trial after it was determined his wife had died of a rare heart condition. By that time, the veteran Atlantic City policeman had been suspended from his job and lost custody of his two young daughters.

Judges at the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Andros could not sue because the prosecutors were acting in their official role in charging him and the investigators had probable cause to suspect him in his wife's death.

Arizona state legislators and the state superintendent of public instruction want to be freed from federal court oversight of the state's programs for English learners. They've been ordered by a lower court judge to spend potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with rulings in a 17-year-old case.

Parents of students attending southern Arizona's Nogales Unified School District sued the state in 1992, contending programs for English-language learners in Nogales were deficient and received inadequate funding from the state.

In 2000, a federal judge found that the state had violated the Equal Educational Opportunities Act's requirements for appropriate instruction for English-language learners. He ordered state legislators to create a plan to provide sufficient funds and placed the state's programs for non-English speaking students under court oversight.

Since then, the two sides have fought over what constitutes compliance with the order. Arizona has more than doubled the amount that schools receive per non-English speaking student and taken several other steps prescribed by the No Child Left Behind Act, a broader education accountability law passed by Congress in 2002.

Plaintiffs say that's not enough to comply with federal law and a judge agreed. But the state appealed, and now the high court will answer the question.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema told a gathering at the University of Virginia law school that the courts' ability to handle even the most complicated terrorism cases was demonstrated by the prosecution of terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui in her courtroom.

She also said the government should not abuse classification procedures to suppress information about mistreatment of detainees. She said it's been her experience that much of what the government seeks to keep classified has more to do with avoiding embarrassment than divulging secrets.

"As embarrassing and as ugly as some of this information might be, it is not in my view national security information," she said.

Her remarks come as the Obama administration decides what to do with detainees at Guantanamo, which it wants to close by January 2010.

One option is to bring suspected terrorists to trial in the United States, though some critics have questioned whether traditional courts can handle the volume of classified information involved. Some argue that military courts or a some sort of hybrid national security court would provide a better forum.

The frauds involved so-called "straw buyers" — people who received a fee for agreeing to use their name and credit information to obtain mortgages on dozens of properties. Such scams have proliferated around the country in recent years, although rarely in such a high-profile location as Wednesday's bust.

The Hamptons have long been a getaway for the rich and famous, with celebrities and wealthy New Yorkers spending exorbitant amounts of money on mansions and summer rentals. Prosecutors said some of the homes that were rented to vacationers were fraudulently purchased through the mortgage fraud scheme.

The straw buyers either filled out phony loan applications claiming inflated or nonexistent incomes — in one case claiming a salary of nearly $450,000 a year — or said they were employed by corporations controlled by some of the schemers, Spota said.

One of these companies was identified as Arena Studios, Inc. a Manhattan business that at one time provided dominatrix services, the prosecutor said. Another source of straw buyers was a company called Maximum Restraint Films.