The attorney who represented Michael Skakel during his Connecticut murder trial in 2002 took the stand Friday and defended the work he did for the Kennedy cousin, while also saying he still believes Skakel is innocent.

Skakel is challenging his conviction in Rockville Superior Court on the ground that he was deprived of his constitutional right to effective legal representation.

The 52-year-old nephew of Robert F. Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy, is serving 20 years to life for the 1975 golf club bludgeoning of Martha Moxley when they were 15-year-old neighbors in Greenwich.

On the stand Thursday, Skakel launched a barrage of criticism against Sherman, portraying an overly confident lawyer having fun and basking in the limelight while making fundamental mistakes from poor jury picks to failing to track down key witnesses. Skakel also said Sherman took photos of the trial judge and jury with a pen camera and had him sign an autograph.

Issues dealing with church and state will always be among the toughest the nation's courts deal with and there's no easy test for deciding them, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said Monday.

"Religious pluralism lies at the very heart of the American political tradition and I think it remains a major concern as our country becomes ever more the home of larger and larger communities of people from widely different ethnic and religious backgrounds," the first woman appointed to the high court told a legal symposium focusing on a constitutional test she proposed in a high court ruling almost 30 years ago.

The symposium at the Charleston School of Law was sponsored by the Charleston Law Review and the Riley Institute at Furman University.

O'Connor's endorsement test proposed that a government action can violate the First Amendment's separation of church and state if a reasonable observer sees that action as either endorsing or disapproving religion. But O'Connor, who is 83 and who retired from the court in 2006, said that there is no grand unified theory for applying to such cases. Over the years the Supreme Court has made seemingly contradictory decisions.

The top prosecutor in Northern California's remote Del Norte County has been suspended without pay after a judge recommended he be disbarred.

The Del Norte Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in a closed session Friday to suspend District Attorney Jon Alexander.

The suspension comes after State Bar Judge Lucy Armendariz recommended that Alexander be disbarred after concluding Alexander had violated three rules of prosecutorial conduct - communication with a represented party, moral turpitude and suppression of evidence.

The judge ordered Alexander placed on inactive status, meaning he will not be able to practice law in California as of Sunday, pending a possible appeal.

A proposal by the state's judicial branch to charge $10 to view a public file at the Santa Rosa courthouse is being criticized by those who say it would limit access to public information.

A spokesman for the Judicial Council, the policymaking body of the courts, tells the Santa Rosa Press Democrat the search fee would generate $6 million annually.

But open government advocates and some journalists say it will create an unfair financial barrier to public documents.

The new search fee is among 11 recommendations from a panel of judges, lawyers and legislators that have been sent to Sacramento for inclusion in Gov. Jerry Brown's budget.

The newspaper says the proposals are expected to raise $30 million statewide.

An attorney representing a family bent out of shape over a public school yoga program in the beach city of Encinitas filed a lawsuit Wednesday to stop the district-wide classes.

In the lawsuit filed in San Diego Superior Court, attorney Dean Broyles argued that the twice weekly, 30-minute classes are inherently religious, in violation of the separation between church and state.

The plaintiffs are Stephen and Jennifer Sedlock and their children, who are students in the Encinitas Union School District.

"EUSD's Ashtanga yoga program represents a serious breach of the public trust," Broyles said. "Compliance with the clear requirements of law is not optional or discretionary. This is frankly the clearest case of the state trampling on the religious freedom rights of citizens that I have personally witnessed in my 18 years of practice as a constitutional attorney."

Superintendent Timothy B. Baird said he had not seen the lawsuit and could not directly comment on it, but he defended the district's decision to integrate yoga into its curriculum this year.

The district is believed to be the first in the country to have full-time yoga teachers at every one of its schools. The lessons are funded by a $533,000, three-year grant from the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes Asthanga yoga. Since the district started the classes at its nine schools in January, Baird said teachers and parents have noticed students are calmer, using the breathing practices to release stress before tests.

Drew Peterson's wisecracking, limelight-hogging, sunglasses-wearing lawyers faced the media horde every day of the former suburban Chicago police officer's 2012 trial — one that ended with a murder conviction and a falling out among the erstwhile colleagues.

But the lawyerly war of words in public between lead trial counsel Joel Brodsky and former partner-turned-nemesis Steve Greenberg that began within hours of the trial's end will come to a head Tuesday at a hearing where the defense will argue Peterson deserves a new trial because Brodsky did a shoddy job.

It's just the latest of many peculiar chapters in the saga of the former Bolingbrook police sergeant, who gained notoriety after his much younger fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, vanished in 2007. There was speculation Peterson sought to parlay his law enforcement expertise to get away with murder.

If Will County Judge Edward Burmila rejects the motion for a retrial, he has said he will proceed quickly to sentencing. Peterson, 59, faces a maximum 60-year prison term for murdering his third wife, Kathleen Savio, who was found dead in her bathtub with a gash on her head.

Disagreements among legal teams during trials aren't uncommon, but those spats spilling into public are, said Gal Pissetzky, a Chicago-area defense attorney who isn't connected to the Peterson case.

Attorneys for the parents of two students who were killed in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre want a state Supreme Court hearing on their request to put Tech's president on trial for negligence. Meanwhile, the state wants to reverse a jury's conclusion that the university was negligent for failing to alert students right away when the shootings began.

Attorneys for both sides asked a panel of three Supreme Court justices Tuesday to decide if the full court will hear the appeals. A decision is expected in four to six weeks.

The dueling appeals stem from a jury's findings in March 2012 that the university botched its response to the massacre, which left the gunman and 32 students and faculty dead in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.