Jose Medellin, set to die Tuesday for his participation in the gang rape and beating deaths of two Houston girls, said that the high court should block his execution until Texas grants him a new hearing to comply with an international court ruling.

The state has so far refused, and the court ruled in March that neither President Bush nor the international court can force Texas' hand. But Medellin says Congress or the Texas legislature should be given a chance to pass a law ordering a new hearing before he can be executed.

Four Democratic lawmakers have introduced such a bill in Congress, but it probably will not be acted upon this year. The Texas legislature does not meet again until January.

Medellin is one of roughly 50 Mexicans on death rows around the nation who were denied prompt access to their country's consular officials after being arrested in the United States. The access is guaranteed by international treaty.

Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr. had acknowledged calling the teens "trouble makers" and "a violent bunch" but insisted he could be impartial. Judge Thomas M. Yeager, who was asked by defense attorneys to review the case, found there was an appearance of impropriety and recused Mauffray.

"The right to a fair and impartial judge is of particular importance in the present cases," Yeager wrote.

Six black teens were arrested and initially charged with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder in connection with a December 4, 2006, attack on fellow Jena High School student Justin Barker, who is white. The charges were later reduced.

Jesse Ray Beard, Robert Bailey Jr., Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and Theo Shaw now face aggravated second-degree battery charges. Beard is charged as a juvenile.

John Cabaniss, a trial attorney for the Milwaukee law firm von Briesen & Roper SC, is leaving the firm to launch his own practice in Mequon focusing on personal injury cases.

The move will alleviate some of the conflicts of interest that arose while he worked for von Briesen & Roper, said Randall Crocker, president and CEO of the law firm.

"We’ve discovered that John’s practice as a plaintiff’s trial lawyer and the firm’s continued growth in health care, toxic tort defense, management labor and general business has created conflicts of interest that have precluded John from taking the cases that he’s particularly good at," Crocker said in a press release Friday.

Cabaniss concurs.

"Regrettably, a personal injury plaintiff’s practice is, at times, not consistent with a large corporate, health and business law firm,” Cabaniss said.

The new firm will be known as the Cabaniss Law Office and will be at 10200 N. Port Washington Road in Mequon.

The Bogatin Law Firm PLC, one of Memphis' oldest law firms, will dissolve on Friday.

10 Bogatin attorneys will be absorbed by law firm Evans & Petree PC, which employs 29 attorneys, in a merger that will create one of the top five Memphis-based law firms. A source familiar with the merger said the name Evans Petree Bogatin has been proposed to serve as the combined firm's moniker.

According to another source familiar with the deal, several Bogatin attorneys will not join the combined law firm, including: Stephen Biller, Stephen Brown, Susan Callison, Charles Cottam, Charles Key, Jack Magids and Robert Wilson.

Irvin Bogatin, founder of The Bogatin Law Firm, died last month.

Managing partners of Evans & Petree and Bogatin declined to comment.

In April, Memphis Business Journal reported on the planned dissolution of Bogatin and its merger with Evans & Petree. In October 2007, MBJ first reported on early merger talks between the two firms, which called for 20 Bogatin attorneys to be absorbed by Evans & Petree.

Located at 1000 Ridgeway Loop, Evans & Petree will now add Bogatin's strong litigation practice, which will compliment Evans & Petree's focus on transactional law, estate planning and corporate law, MBJ has reported. Both Bogatin and Evans & Petree practice in health care and tax law.

Gerber Products Co. and the Food and Drug Administration have found no evidence of tampering with Gerber products. The company was flooded with complaints after people saw the videos, the FDA said.

Authorities said Anton Dunn caused to be posted on the Internet three videos of himself in which he boasted about the poisonings and said he could not be caught.

Dunn, 42, of New York, was charged with sending threats in interstate commerce and falsely claiming to have tampered with a consumer product, crimes that carry a potential penalty of 10 years in prison upon conviction.

A U.S. District Court judge ordered Dunn held until a bail hearing on Tuesday. His lawyer, Sarah Baumgartel, had no comment outside court.

In a statement, Gerber's parent company, Nestle Nutrition, said it believed the Internet postings were a "malicious hoax" and the company was cooperating with authorities.

"The safety of Gerber and Nestle Nutrition products is our top priority," it said.

In court papers, FDA agent Michael Felezzola wrote that a Gerber representative on April 20 reported a threatening video entitled "gerbersbabyfoodalert" had been posted on YouTube.

In the 10-minute video, apparently recorded in a shower stall, a man identified as Trashman said Gerber employees acting at his direction had poisoned millions of bottles of baby food with the intent to kill babies.

Authorities said the person appearing on the videos was Dunn and he sometimes wore a mask that partially covered his face. Subsequent videos stated that the poisoning would involve cyanide and rat poison, and that four babies had already died.

Dunn, who is black, claimed in a July 24 video that he was trying to kill black and Hispanic babies, though white babies also were likely to die, authorities said.

"Our main reason for doing this is we're trying to cut down on the black population," the video says.

The justices in a 5-4 vote late Wednesday stopped the execution by injection of Thomas Arthur "pending further orders of this Court." Arthur, 66, was scheduled to die Thursday, more than 26 years after he was convicted of killing Troy Wicker Jr. of Muscle Shoals.

It was the third time Arthur received a stay on the eve of his execution.

"My reaction is we finally look forward to the opportunity to examine fully Mr. Arthur's claim of innocence by assessing witness testimony and DNA evidence," said defense attorney Suhana S. Han. "That is the right result."

State Attorney General Troy King called the stay a serious setback for the prosecution.

"The crimes against Troy Wicker's family continue to compound," he said. "There is a good chance he is going to escape his sentence before all is said and done."

Han said Arthur "was absolutely ecstatic."

"Having to face execution is something that most of us can never really imagine," she said.

Arthur's attorneys sought a stay from the governor and the courts by using Monday's sworn statement by Bobby Ray Gilbert, who claimed he killed Wicker. Gilbert is serving a life sentence for a different murder.

But Wicker's widow, who served 10 years of a life sentence for hiring the killer, told attorney general investigators that she never met Gilbert.

"I hired and paid money to Thomas Arthur, not Bobby Gilbert, to kill Troy Wicker," Judy Wicker said in a statement Monday.

Han said a hearing was needed to assess the credibility of Gilbert and Wicker.

Congressional Democrats called the ruling a ringing endorsement of the principle that nobody is above the law. They swiftly announced that the Bush officials who have defied their subpoenas, including Bush's former top adviser Karl Rove, must appear as part of a probe of whether the White House directed the firings of nine federal prosecutors. Democrats announced plans to open hearings at the height of election season. The Bush administration was expected to appeal.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge John Bates said there's no legal basis for Bush's argument and that his former legal counsel, Harriet Miers, must appear before Congress. If she wants to refuse to testify, he said, she must do so in person. The committee also has sought to force testimony from White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten.