Some sentences have been thrown out because U.S. Supreme Court rulings demand it. At least seven inmates on Pennsylvania's death row, including Marty Graham, were spared when the justices barred the execution of the mentally retarded in 2002. Several others who committed their crimes as juveniles escaped the death penalty after the high court in 2005 abolished it for offenders under 18.

However, the bulk of the reversals have turned on legal errors in the original trials, and most of them were in Philadelphia cases dating to the 1980s and early 1990s.

“It gave us the opportunity to do both scripted and nonscripted programming that exactly mirrored the position we architected and crafted using consumer research,” Turner Entertainment Networks President Steve Koonin told B&C in an interview.

The Blackstone Group, the big buyout firm, has devised a way for its partners to effectively avoid paying taxes on $3.7 billion, the bulk of what it raised last month from selling shares to the public.

. . . several tax lawyers, who could not be quoted by name because their firms had restricted them from making public comments on these issues, agreed in principle with the analysis of the tax structure’s implications.

The fourth, not tenth, paragraph identifies by name and publication the person who distilled the tax structure in full.

The plan, laid out in the fine print of Blackstone’s financial documents, comes as Congress debates how much managers at private equity firms like Blackstone and hedge funds should pay in taxes on their compensation.

Lee Sheppard, a tax lawyer who critiques deals for Tax Notes magazine and has studied the Blackstone arrangement, said it was a reminder of the disconnect between the tax debate in Congress and how the tax system actually operates at the highest levels of the economy.

The archdiocese has agreed to pay $250 million, its insurers will pay $227 million, and various religious orders will pay $60 million, Mahony said. Payment of the remaining $123 million is subject to further negotiation between plaintiffs' lawyers and various religious orders, such as the Claretians, but the archdiocese has guaranteed it will cover anything the orders do not pay.

The Tribune always has been committed to good, independent Court coverage and believed it should have its own reporter covering the beat--even when the Court wasn't producing daily stories like some other beats. The editors understood that sometimes it takes a day or two of reading briefs--days when you're not filing stories--to really master the case or the issue. And they always encouraged me to travel and find interesting and distinctive stories. Unlike some places, it didn't combine the Justice and Court beats (which obviously tends to swallow up the Court coverage, since Justice can be all-consuming). It really was a terrific place to be a Supreme Court reporter. . . .

In an interview, Justice Antonin Scalia told me that given the chance, he would probably vote to reverse New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

But the media deserve a public reckoning, too, a remonstrance for coverage that--albeit with admirable exceptions--all too eagerly embraced the inflammatory statements of a prosecutor in the midst of a tough election campaign. Fueled by Nifong, the media quickly latched onto a narrative too seductive to check: rich, wild, white jocks had brutalized a working class, black mother of two.

When AJR won Syracuse's new Mirror Award in the general excellence category this year, one of the judges went out of his way to tell us how much he and his fellow judges had been impressed by her work.

It's a loaded, partisan word, one that implies wrongdoing and scandal where none exists, and inserting it into a political argument gives the inserter the upper hand. When loophole creeps into news stories, they start to read like editorials.

Now Mr. Roe is the criminal defendant, facing up to three years in prison for the sin of being scared silent. Charged with making a false statement, he is Exhibit A in law enforcement’s increasingly desperate war on witness intimidation in cities plagued by gang violence. His is one of a small but growing cadre of cases nationally in which angry and frustrated prosecutors are turning the tables on witnesses who recant.