The Supreme Court won't overturn a death sentence for a man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her infant daughter in Oklahoma.

The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from Raymond Eugene Johnson. Johnson was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder by a Tulsa County jury in 2009 in the June 2007 deaths of Brooke Whitaker, 24, and her 7-month-old daughter, Kya Whitaker. Prosecutors said Johnson beat Brooke Whitaker in the head with a hammer, set her on fire and left her and the baby to burn in their gasoline-doused home.

Oklahoma courts have refused to stop his execution, and the high court now also has refused to intervene.

In a case that challenges Britain's definition of murder, a severely disabled man who says his life has no "privacy or dignity" will be granted a hearing on his request that a doctor be allowed to give him a lethal injection.

Tony Nicklinson suffered a paralyzing stroke in 2005 that left him unable to speak or move below his neck. The former rugby player and corporate manager requires constant care and communicates largely by blinking, although his mind has remained unaffected.

"I am fed up with my life and don't want to spend the next 20 years or so like this," Nicklinson said in a statement.

In January, Nicklinson asked the High Court to declare that any doctor who kills him with his consent will not be charged with murder. On Monday, a judge said the request may proceed, making it the first right-to-die case of its kind to get a hearing in a British court.

The 57-year-old's condition is stable, though Nicklinson has refused since 2007 to take any life-prolonging drugs recommended by doctors, including heart medication or blood thinners.

The ministry of justice argued that granting Nicklinson's request would require changing the law on murder and that such changes must be made by Parliament. The government had applied to have the case dismissed.

All known requests to stop the execution of an Arizona death row inmate have been denied, so the plan to carry out a second death sentence in eight days moved ahead Thursday.

Robert Charles Towery, 47, was scheduled to be given a lethal injection at 10 a.m. at the state prison in Florence, after spending nearly 20 years on death row for robbing and killing Mark Jones, of Scottsdale.

Towery's attorneys made several unsuccessful last-minute arguments in an effort to spare him, including a Wednesday request with the Arizona Supreme Court to reduce his sentence to 25 years to life in prison because Towery's co-defendant spent less than 10 years in prison.

Randy Allen Barker, the other man convicted in the killing, was given a plea deal for testifying against Towery and was released from prison in 2001.

Towery's lawyers argued that although Towery strangled Jones, Barker was holding the gun, watched the prolonged killing and "exhibited extreme indifference to human life."

Israel's Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing this week on the appeal of a Palestinian prisoner waging an unprecedented hunger strike that has stretched for more than two months, court officials and his lawyers said Monday.

Khader Adnan, a member of the Islamic Jihad militant group, is demanding he be released immediately. He has not been charged with a crime and does not know what he is suspected of doing.

The case of the 33-year-old Adnan has attracted widespread attention among Palestinians, with large crowds holding regular protests in his support.

The life-threatening gamble has also drawn broader attention toward Israel's policy of "administrative detention," under which Palestinians can be held without charge for months, and even years, at a time.

Both the European Union and the United Nations have said they are following the case closely and urged Israel to give Adnan an open trial.

Adnan was arrested on Dec. 17 and later sentenced to four months of administrative detention. He launched the strike a day after his arrest, protesting his administrative detention and claiming he was beaten and humiliated in captivity.

As a young state senator 30 years ago, Paul Pfeifer helped write Ohio's death penalty law. Today, as the senior member of the state Supreme Court, he's trying to eliminate it.

It's not uncommon for sitting judges to change their mind on the death penalty — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun famously said in 1994 he would no longer "tinker with the machinery of death" — but Pfeifer may be the only one to argue so ardently against a capital punishment law he himself created, and yet continue to rule on death penalty cases.

"I have concluded that the death sentence makes no sense to me at this point when you can have life without the possibility of parole," Pfeifer said in his most recent public comments, testifying in December in favor a bill to abolish Ohio's law. "I don't see what society gains from that.

After the U.S. Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional in 1972, states spent several years rewriting their laws. Ohio's first attempt, in 1974, was found unconstitutional, but the second try, when Pfeifer was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was enacted in 1981 and has never been successfully challenged. Lawmakers pledged at the time to draft a law reserved for the most heinous murders.

The former Bush administration lawyer under fire for defending the federal ban on gay marriage is getting support from an unexpected source — Attorney General Eric Holder.

Former solicitor general Paul Clement quit his law firm after it announced Monday that it was withdrawing from the case amid criticism from gay rights advocacy groups. Clement is moving to another firm to continue the work.

Holder told reporters Tuesday that Clement is a great lawyer and criticism of him is misplaced. He said Clement is "doing that which lawyers do" in representing legislators who wrote the law.

President Barack Obama ordered Holder's Justice Department in February to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. That led House Republicans to hire Clement.

A former fugitive is due in federal court in Detroit to face charges he was a member of a violent ring that lured Eastern European women to the United States and forced them to become strippers.

The U.S. attorney's office says Veniamin Gonikman, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Ukraine, was due in court Friday afternoon. He consented to the transfer from New York last month.

Court papers claim Gonikman was using a fake Russian passport while living in Ukraine. Officials there arrested him on Jan. 26 and ordered his deportation.

The Associated Press reported on the case involving Gonikman last year in a lengthy investigation of the exploitation of a U.S. cultural exchange program that provides foreign college students temporary visas to live and work in the United States.