Federal Judge

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge struck down yesterday a new law that gives the president the power to delete individual items from spending bills he signs -- a budget-cutting tool that presidents have sought for more than a century.Acting one year and one day after President Clinton signed the "line-item veto" measure into law, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Congress had no power to transfer any part of its legislative power to the White House.Clinton has yet to use this authority.

In an effort to avoid prison time, the wife of former state Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell Sr. is adopting a time-honored legal strategy with a new twist. Blame your lawyer. Or in this case, blame your three former attorneys. Mary Patricia Bromwell, who has been represented by four separate lawyers, argued in court papers that the federal judge at her sentencing today should not penalize her for waiting more than 1 1/2 years after her indictment to plead guilty. She pleaded in July to accepting a salary for a no-show job at a contractor controlled by Baltimore-based Poole and Kent construction company in return for her husband's intervention in contract talks.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton's policy on gays in the military may ultimately be upheld by the courts, but for now it is in deep legal trouble, and uncertainty over its future seems likely to last for months.Just as the president appeared this week to be putting the issue behind him by getting his new policy through Congress, the gays policy was under attack from two federal judges -- one here and the other in California.Justice Department lawyers have been going to court after court for weeks to defend the Pentagon against a variety of constitutional challenges by gay soldiers or sailors.

NEW YORK - FAO Inc., which is trying to sell its Right Start infant and toddler toy stores to keep them from being closed, had a federal judge reject a prospective buyer on concern that it lacked adequate funding to operate the stores. Judge Joel Rosenthal rejected Los Angeles-based private equity fund Hancock Park LP's proposal to buy Right Start at a court hearing Tuesday in Worcester, Mass. Jeffrey Meyers, a lawyer representing seven Right Start store landlords, said yesterday in an interview.

The Kansas-based anti-gay church that was smacked with a $10.9 million jury award against its members has asked a federal judge in Baltimore to review the judgment. The father of a Marine killed in Iraq successfully sued Westboro Baptist Church and three of its leaders for invading his family's privacy when church members waved anti-gay signs at his son's funeral in Westminster. The verdict late last month in U.S. District Court in Baltimore was the first against Westboro Baptist Church, a small but vocal Christian group based in Topeka that has protested military funerals with placards bearing shock-value messages such as "Thank God for dead soldiers."

WASHINGTON - A federal judge ruled yesterday that nine states may pursue their challenge to Microsoft Corp.'s proposed antitrust settlement with the Bush administration. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly rejected Microsoft's motion to throw out the states' bid for antitrust penalties tougher than those that the proposed settlement of the 4-year-old case would impose. Last year, a federal appeals court upheld findings that Microsoft acted illegally to protect its monopoly on the Windows operating system.

A federal judge refused yesterday to halt demolition work at Memorial Stadium, handing another setback to preservationists' 11th-hour efforts to save the North Baltimore landmark. Activists said they will appeal the ruling by U.S. District Judge Andre M. Davis. But as crews tore away the concrete bleachers where generations of fans watched the Orioles and the Colts, opponents acknowledged that time and the avenues for a challenge are limited. "We're in the process of losing a landmark structure and a great development opportunity," said D. Tyler Gearhart, executive director of Preservation Maryland, which has led a campaign to save the stadium.

WASHINGTON - John W. Hinckley Jr., the man who shot President Ronald Reagan, won a federal judge's permission yesterday to make unsupervised visits with his parents beyond the grounds of St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he has lived for the past two decades. Lawyers for the 48-year-old would-be assassin argued that he had made sufficient strides in more than 20 years of psychiatric treatment that it was safe to allow him to spend time with his parents away from the supervision and scrutiny of the hospital staff.

NEW YORK - A federal judge ruled yesterday that an American being held in a Navy brig as a suspected terrorist should be allowed to talk to his lawyers. But the judge also reaffirmed the government's broad authority to detain people it regards as "enemy combatants," even if they are U.S. citizens. In ruling that the suspect, Jose Padilla, can consult with his lawyers, Judge Michael B. Mukasey of U.S. District Court in Manhattan rejected the government's argument that Padilla might use them as a conduit to relay signals to enemies of the United States.

WASHINGTON - A federal judge killed parts of the federal government's sweeping lawsuit against the cigarette companies yesterday but kept alive a broad claim that might yet force the industry to forfeit billions of dollars in profits. U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler, in a 55-page opinion, ruled that the government had put forth a strong enough claim of a possible violation of anti-racketeering law to justify going forward on that part of the case. Specifically, she decided that the government could pursue its theory that as long as the companies remain in the tobacco business, "they will have countless opportunities and temptations to take unlawful actions, just as it is alleged they have done since 1953."