A man scheduled to be executed on Friday was issued a stay just minutes before he was to be electrocuted, triggering a flurry of legal moves as the state sought to carry out the sentence before a midnight deadline.

James Earl Reed had been scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Friday. A federal judge in Columbia issued the stay at 5:40 p.m. after a defense attorney's last-minute request for the execution to be halted. Five hours later, the appeals court vacated the stay and defense lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the execution. The state was fighting that possibility.

Under the state's execution order, the death sentence had to be carried out by midnight or it would have to be rescheduled. By 11 p.m., as the high court considered the defense's request, witnesses for the execution were being brought to the death chamber.

Reed, 49, has been on death row since 1996, when he was convicted of murdering Joseph and Barbara Lafayette in their Charleston County home two years earlier. Prosecutors said he was looking for an ex-girlfriend.

During his trial, Reed fired his attorney and represented himself, denying the killings despite a confession and arguing that no physical evidence placed him at the scene. Jurors found him guilty and decided he should die.

In the request for the stay, the defense attorney cited a U.S. Supreme Court decision the day before regarding defendants' rights to represent themselves, according to the order by U.S. District Judge Henry Floyd. The high court on Thursday said a defendant can be judged competent to stand trial, yet incapable of acting as his own lawyer.

Reed would be the first person executed by electric chair in the U.S. in nearly a year and South Carolina's first since 2004.

In South Carolina, anyone sentenced to death may choose the electric chair or lethal injection. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, eight other states electrocute inmates.

The Federal Trade Commission claims the D.C. Circuit misunderstood patent law in finding Rambus Corp. a "lawful monopolist," though the memory chip-maker abused its power as a member of a standards-setting organization to acquire that monopoly.

The FTC seeks a rehearing en banc of the court's April 22 order setting aside the FTC's final order that Rambus cease and desist.

"The proceeding involved an issue of exceptional importance, in that the panel's failure to recognize the competitive harm that anticompetitive deception causes in the context of industry standard-setting organizations constitutes a significant error that has grave implications for beneficial industry standard-setting," the FTC says.

It claims the federal court panel's decision "is inconsistent with the causation standard for monopolization articulated by this Court's en banc decision in United States v. Microsoft Corp., 253 F.3rd 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001)."

And the FTC claims, "The panel decision improperly extends the Supreme Court's holding in holding in NYNEX v. Discon, Inc., 525 U.S. 128 (1998), to protect a firm's use of deception to achieve monopoly power."

The 8th Circuit denied asylum to two Hungarian citizens who claimed they were attacked by skinheads in their native country because they are Roma, or gypsies.

Istvan Beck and Hilda Beckne Aranyi claimed they often ran into trouble in Hungary due to their Roma ethnicity. They were allegedly teased in school, denied employment opportunities and attacked by skinheads.

However, Judge Loken ruled that the plaintiffs did not show a clear probability of future persecution. The Hungarian government did not direct or condone the crimes, and the police had tried to find their alleged attackers.

Loken also cited a report by the State Department stating that the situation in Hungary is improving. The government has been fining companies that discriminate against Roma, and it is even considering an affirmative action program.

Beck and Aranyi have overstayed their U.S. visas by two years.

The Poplar Bluff Public Library constructively fired an assistant because her religious beliefs prohibited her from working on "Harry Potter Night," Deborah Smith claims in Federal Court.

Smith says her Southern Baptist Church prohibits promotion of the worship of the occult. She considers Harry Potter part of the occult.

Smith says she told her supervisor she could not take part in the library's "Harry Potter Night" on July 20, 2007 to promote the release of the latest book in the series. But, she says, library director Jacqueline Thomas told her she would have to work behind the scenes, out of sight of other church members, and questioned Smith's sincerity, the suit states.

When Smith refused, Thomas suspended her without pay for 10 days. Upon Smith's return, her hours were cut and she was demoted to shelving, a more physically demanding job, she says.

Smith says she had to resign due to the physical demands. She claims the City of Poplar Bluff and Thomas caused her to lose income, suffer physical and emotional distress and humiliation and violated her constitutional rights to freedom of religion. Smith seeks punitive damages and is represented by Anthony Rothert of St. Louis. Poplar Bluff is 150 miles south of St. Louis.

In an antitrust lawsuit, a man who was denied accreditation as a crane operator claims the National Commission for Certification of Crane Operators and the International Assessment Institute conspire to monopolize training schools in California, and that the Institute pays kickbacks to Commission for the tests it administers.

Plaintiff Timothy Maxwell claims he passed all the required courses and tests but the defendants denied him certification anyway, costing him a job.

He demands punitive damages for antitrust violations, breach of contract, unfair competition, false advertising and interference with prospective business.

He is represented in Alameda County Court by James Dombroski of Petaluma.

A Texas court Monday set the execution date for Mexican national and Texas prisoner Jose Ernesto Medellin  for August 5, after the US Supreme Court ruled in March that President George W. Bush did not have the authority to direct state courts to comply with a ruling from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) granting new court hearings. The government of Mexico and Medellin's lawyers had requested that the judge hold off on setting an execution date, but Judge Caprice Cosper scheduled the lethal injection after refusing to allow a legal adviser to the Mexican Foreign Secretary to speak before the court.

Medellin, a Mexican national sentenced to death for raping and murdering two teenage girls, had appealed a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals November 2006 ruling that Bush had "exceeded his constitutional authority" by ordering state court rehearings for 51 Mexican nationals, including Medellin, convicted in US courts. The president's February 2005 memorandum instructed the Texas courts to follow a March 2004 ICJ decision that held that Medellin and the other Mexican nationals tried in US courts had been denied their right under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations to contact the Mexican consulate for legal assistance and that the US was obligated to grant review and reconsideration of their convictions and sentences.