Two jurors in the double murder trial of disgraced South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh have COVID, leaving the future of the proceedings in some doubt as they enter their 16th day Monday.

Judge Clifton Newman decided keep the trial going in the packed Colleton County courtroom after the remaining 10 jurors and five alternates tested negative. They will be tested again on Wednesday. The clerk of court also tested positive for the virus.

Newman said jurors agreed to wear masks. He rejected suggestions from both the defense and prosecutors to delay the trial until that second round of tests Wednesday, reduce the over 200 people allowed to attend the trial each day or order everyone in the courtroom to wear masks other than testifying witnesses and questioning attorneys.

“At the moment, we are going to encourage everyone here to mask up for your own protection as well as the protection of these proceedings and each other,” Newman said.

Murdaugh, 54, faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted of murdering his wife, 52-year-old Maggie, and their 22-year-old son Paul near dog kennels at the family’s Colleton County home on June 7, 2021.

Monday marked the fourth week of the trial and the 13th day of testimony with prosecutors still presenting their case. They called state agents who tested evidence for DNA.

The trial started with six alternate jurors, but is now down to three.

“My only concern is we don’t create train wreck with this jury,” said defense attorney Dick Harpootlian, who immediately began wearing a mask.

Prosecutor Creighton Waters said he agreed with the defense that delaying the trial for a few days to make sure COVID isn’t spreading is much better than losing so many jurors there has to be a mistrial and three weeks of work is gone. He also suggested limiting the number of people inside the large, century-old courtroom. The trial is being livestreamed and shown on television.

“A little less numbers might be warranted. None of us want to limit anything, but we’re in different paradigm. Both of us have a concern about getting this thing to the end without COVID causing it to fall apart,” Waters said.

The judge said he would keep all options in mind, but for now the trial will continue without any changes.

“We just have to take precautions as we all do as we navigate through life during this period of time,” Newman said.

A federal judge said Friday Alabama prisons remain critically understaffed, with court filings showing the number of officers in state lockups has continued to drop despite a court order to increase numbers.

The prison system has lost more than 500 security staff employees over the last 18 months, according to court filings.

“We had horrendous understaffing in this department and something has to be done,” U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson said during a status conference in the long-running lawsuit over prison health care.

In 2017, Thompson found that mental health care in Alabama prisons is so inadequate that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. He said understaffing is one of the root issues and ordered the state to increase the number of corrections officers.

William Van Der Pol, a lawyer representing inmates in the lawsuit, told Thompson that Alabama has fewer correctional officers than when the litigation began or at any point where they could find comparative numbers.

The state has used pay raises and recruitment efforts to boost officer numbers, but has been hindered by a tight labor market, Bill Lunsford, a lawyer for the state argued.

Thompson asked the two sides to compare current staffing levels to what they were in 2014 when the case was filed.

Van Der Pol, an attorney with the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, told Thompson that based on available numbers the prison system is at its “lowest number in history” for officers working at major facilities.

A judicial oversight commission has dismissed a complaint against a liberal-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who accused an attorney for former President Donald Trump of making racist contentions and trying to protect his “king” in a case challenging the 2020 election results in the battleground state.

Judicial complaints are confidential under Wisconsin law but Justice Jill Karofsky released documents to The Associated Press on Saturday that show a retired attorney in Maryland filed one against her with the Wisconsin Judicial Commission two years ago. The commission decided in November 2022 not to discipline her but warned her to remain neutral and avoid making sarcastic remarks from the bench.

Karofsky’s attorney remained defiant, telling the commission in a letter Tuesday that Karofsky was trying to save the U.S. government and accusing the panel of allowing itself to become a political weapon.

“The Judicial Code (sic) requires judges to act with impartiality towards the parties, but it does not require a judge to turn a blind-eye to dangerous, bad-faith conduct by a lawyer or litigant,” Karofsky said in an email to the AP, quoting a passage from one of her attorney’s responses to the commission. “It is beyond reason to read the Code to require judges to be mouse-like quiet when parties are arguing in favor of a slow-motion coup.”

Trump filed suit in Wisconsin in December 2020 after a recount confirmed Democrat Joe Biden had won the state by about 21,000 votes. The filing was one of scores of lawsuits Trump filed across multiple states in an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the election results and remain in office.

The Wisconsin lawsuit asked the state Supreme Court to toss out about 171,000 absentee ballots cast in Dane and Milwaukee counties. The conservative-leaning court ultimately rejected the lawsuit by a 4-3 vote, with swing Justice Brian Hagedorn casting the deciding vote to uphold Biden’s victory in the battleground state.

Maryland attorney Fletcher Thompson filed a complaint against Karofsky in January 2021 accusing her of being hostile toward Trump attorney Jim Troupis. He noted that during oral arguments Karofsky told Troupis that the lawsuit “smacks of racism” because it sought to toss out absentee ballots in Wisconsin’s two most diverse counties.

Former Vice President Mike Pence has been subpoenaed by the special counsel overseeing investigations into efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to a person with direct knowledge of the event.

The subpoena to Pence as part of the investigation by special counsel Jack Smith was served in recent days, according to the person, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Thursday to discuss a sensitive issue.

The extraordinary scenario of a former vice president potentially testifying against his former boss in a criminal investigation comes as Pence considers launching a 2024 Republican presidential bid against Trump. The two have been estranged since a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to stop Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.

The subpoena is an aggressive step from a prosecutor who for years led the Justice Department’s public corruption section and who oversaw indictments against major political figures. The move sets the stage for a likely executive privilege fight, given Pence’s close proximity to Trump for four years as major decisions were being contemplated and planned. It is unclear whether efforts to secure voluntary testimony from Pence stalled before the subpoena was issued.

A Texas man pleaded guilty Wednesday to federal hate crime and weapons charges in the racist attack at an El Paso Walmart in 2019, which prosecutors say was preceded by the gunman posting an online screed that warned of a “Hispanic invasion.”

Patrick Crusius, 24, showed little emotion while shackled in an El Paso courtroom just a few miles from the store where he was accused of killing 23 people, including citizens of Mexico, in what remains one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.

Sentencing is not scheduled until later this year, but the U.S. government had previously announced it wouldn’t seek the death penalty. Crusius waived most of his rights to appeal on a total of 90 federal charges, which U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama said would each carry a life sentence.

A Belarusian court on Wednesday sentenced a journalist and prominent member of the country’s sizable Polish minority to eight years in prison, amid an ongoing crackdown on critics of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime.

Andrzej Poczobut, 49, was found guilty of harming Belarus’ national security and “inciting discord” in a closed trial held in the western city of Grodno. Poczobut, a journalist for the influential Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and a top figure in the Union of Poles in Belarus, has been behind bars since his detention in March 2021.

He reported extensively on the mass protests that gripped Belarus for weeks in 2020 following a presidential election that gave Lukashenko, in power since 1994, a new term in office, but that was widely regarded by the opposition and Western countries as fraudulent.

The indictment against Poczobut referenced his coverage of the protests, along with his statements in defense of ethnic Poles in Belarus and reference to the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland as an act of “aggression,” as evidence that he was guilty of the charges.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in a Tweet Wednesday condemned the “inhumane decision by the Belarusian regime” and vowed to “do everything to help the Polish journalist bravely fighting for the truth.”

Poland’s foreign ministry summoned the top Belarusian diplomat in Warsaw, Alexander Tshasnouskyy, to protest the verdict.

Poland demands the release of Poczobut and of all political prisoners in Belarus and urges Minsk to respect international laws and put an end to actions against the Polish minority, the ministry said in a statement.

A majority of the current members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court have picked a favorite candidate in the race that will decide the ideological balance of the court with several major decisions looming.

Republicans, Democrats and their allies are expected to spend millions of dollars on the race because whoever controls the court will be in position to rule on issues ranging from whether the state’s 1849 abortion ban should remain in effect to whether gerrymandered legislative district maps ought to be redrawn.

Justice Ann Walsh Bradley on Tuesday became the latest justice to endorse in the race, throwing her support behind liberal candidate Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Jane Protasiewicz. She is the fourth of seven current justices to issue an endorsement.

Bradley, in a statement, cited Protasiewicz’s experience both as a judge and 25 years as a prosecutor, saying she would be “fair and impartial” on the Supreme Court.

Protasiewicz has raised more money than any of the other candidates and has also been racking up endorsements not just from former justices, but also unions, more than 100 judges and dozens of mostly Democratic elected officials.

She was the first candidate on the air with a TV ad, focusing on abortion, and on Tuesday she released two more spots, including one making light of how difficult her last name is to pronounce.

Outside groups have largely not gotten involved in the primary, but the liberal group A Better Wisconsin Together on Tuesday started running about $800,000 worth of attack ads targeting conservative candidate Waukesha County Circuit Judge Jennifer Dorow.

Dorow’s first ads have focused on her presiding over the trial of Darrell Brooks Jr., who was convicted by a jury of killing six people when he drove his SUV through a Christmas parade in 2021.

And a conservative group funded by GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein, Fair Courts America, launched a $500,000 TV ad buy Friday in support of conservative candidate Dan Kelly. The group’s spokesperson earlier promised to spend millions in support of Kelly, a former Supreme Court justice.

The top two vote-getters in the Feb. 21 primary will advance to the April 4 general election. Early in-person voting began Tuesday across the state and runs through Feb. 19. Exact dates and times available to vote vary.