Sean Bell, who had been spending his last night as a single man partying, was killed in a barrage of 50 police bullets outside a strip club.

The three police officers indicted in the shooting were to go on trial Monday in a case that has sparked protests and debate over excessive force and police conduct in New York City.

Bell's fiancee was expected to be the first witness at the trial, and she has said she plans to be in court every day.

"I feel like I need to know. I need to know why this happened," said Paultre Bell, who had her maiden name legally changed after her fiance's death. "I wake up one day and my world is turned upside down. I have to know why this happened; my family deserves to know."

Sean Bell, 23, was killed Nov. 25, 2006, hours before he was to marry the mother of his two children. He and two friends were confronted by undercover officers investigating reports of drugs and prostitution.

Detective Michael Oliver fired 31 shots, including the one that killed Bell. Detective Gescard Isnora squeezed off 11 rounds, and Detective Marc Cooper fired four times. Oliver and Isnora have pleaded not guilty to manslaughter; Cooper has pleaded not guilty to reckless endangerment.

Police union officials and defense lawyers have said the detectives believed Bell and his friends were going to get a gun, though no weapon was found. The officers opened fire after the car the three men were in lurched forward, bumped Isnora and slammed into an unmarked police minivan, authorities said.

"It is significant that plaintiffs nowhere allege that the government intended to harm human beings through its use of Agent Orange," the three-judge panel said.

Jonathan C. Moore, a lawyer for the Vietnamese plaintiffs, said he was deeply disappointed.

"It's both an unjust and an immoral outcome," he said, and promised to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A lawyer for the companies did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

Monsanto, Dow Chemical and more than a dozen other companies, including Hercules Inc., Occidental Chemical Corp, Thompson Hayward Chemical Co., Harcros Chemicals Inc. and Uniroyal Chemical Co. Inc., were named in the case.

In November 1961, President Kennedy approved the launch of Operation Trail Dust, a campaign of military herbicide operations in Vietnam designed to prevent the enemy from using vegetation for cover and sustenance.

Lawyers for Vietnamese people sued U.S. companies, saying the program caused miscarriages, birth defects, breast cancer, ovarian tumors, lung cancer, Hodgkin's disease and prostate tumors.

They said the military's use of Agent Orange violated international, domestic and Vietnamese law and that companies aided the violations or committed their own by helping the military. They sought unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and an environmental cleanup program.

Lawyers for the companies and the U.S. government had argued that there was no evil intent when Agent Orange was used to clear the Vietnamese landscape for troops.

Agent Orange has been linked to cancer, diabetes and birth defects among Vietnamese soldiers and civilians and American veterans.

In 2002, the United States and Vietnam signed a memorandum of understanding providing for scientists from both governments to work together to determine the effects of Agent Orange on people and ecosystems, along with methods and costs of treatment and environmental remediation.

The United States, though, has never agreed it has a legal duty to provide funds or assistance to remediate harms allegedly caused by Agent Orange.

In a separate opinion, the appellate court also said companies are protected from lawsuits brought by U.S. military veterans or their relatives because the law protects government contractors in certain circumstances who provide defective products.

"It's disgusting, judge," chief defense counsel Joseph Duffy told U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve.

Rezko, 52, a millionaire developer and formerly a fundraiser for both Sen. Barack Obama and Gov. Rod Blagojevich, is being held without bail awaiting the scheduled March 3 start of his political corruption trial. He is accused of joining with millionaire lawyer Stuart Levine in a scheme to use political influence to shake down companies.

Duffy told St. Eve that Rezko's living conditions at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center are so horrible that some means must be found to get him out.

"It's a very degrading way for people to even try to serve time," Duffy said.

He said that while general population inmates have their own supplies of underwear, Rezko and others held in solitary must share.

Rezko, who was born in Syria and has extensive connections in the Mideast, had been free on $2 million bail but St. Eve revoked his bail and ordered him jailed Jan. 28 after prosecutors disclosed he had received $3.5 million from an overseas businessman without informing the court.

Duffy said that if Rezko is released, the defense will pay a security firm to put guards in Rezko's Wilmette mansion 24 hours a day to make certain he doesn't try to flee.

"They will physically deliver him to the courtroom every single day," Duffy said.

The judge said she already had asked the correctional center about Rezko's living conditions and said she was told he was not being singled out. She noted he was being held on a floor where high-profile defendants are kept while authorities assess any risk to them from being in the lockup's general population.

Levine has pleaded guilty and is expected to be the government's star witness at Rezko's trial.

The Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday protecting many types of medical device makers from personal injury lawsuits began rippling through the courts and law offices almost immediately.

Hours after the decision in the case, Riegel v. Medtronic, was announced, lawyers involved in a group of Florida state court cases related to Johnson & Johnson’s drug-coated Cypher heart stent received an e-mail message from Judge Mary Barzee Flores asking for briefs on whether the lawsuits should be allowed to continue.

And lawyers for patients with injuries they attribute to other devices like heart valves, artificial hips and defibrillators said they were girding for a flood of court filings from device makers like Medtronic asking judges to dismiss such lawsuits.

“Medtronic probably already has summary judgment motions ready to go, and I expect to see them filed in the next few days,” said Hunter J. Shkolnik, a New York lawyer.

“The next six months will be consumed fighting about such motions,” Mr. Shkolnik predicted.

He represents more than 600 plaintiffs with lawsuits in state court in Minneapolis stemming from potentially faulty electrical leads Medtronic made for heart defibrillators.

Lasr fall, Medtronic recalled the product, known as the Sprint Fidelis, after reports that the leads — wires that connected the device to the heart — were more prone to developing potentially deadly fractures than an older lead called the Quattro.

In addition to the Sprint Fidelis and the heart stent cases — some in Massachusetts have named Boston Scientific rather than Johnson & Johnson as the defendant — lawyers said Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling could also affect the course of personal injury lawsuits filed against St. Jude Medical over a silver-coated heart valve recalled in 2000.

There were 19 state and federal cases pending involving the St. Jude valve as of last October, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission by the company, which is based in St. Paul.

Other lawsuits that could be affected are ones against Johnson & Johnson and Synthes over spinal disks, and Stryker over artificial hip components. Soundtec, an Oklahoma City-based producer of an implantable hearing aid, had been told just two weeks ago by the Arkansas State Supreme Court that the federal approval of its device did not protect it from a claim in state court that its design was defective. Lawyers say the Arkansas decision is now likely to be reversed.

Recent settlements of large groups of lawsuits on terms relatively favorable to device makers are a sign that lawyers had been anticipating the Supreme Court outcome, according to Mark Herrmann, a Chicago lawyer who defends drug and device companies.

In December, for example, Medtronic announced an agreement to pay $114.1 million to settle 2,682 injury lawsuits related to its 2005 recall of defibrillators with a defective battery. In November, Boston Scientific agreed to pay up to $240 million to settle 8,550 claims stemming from recalls of defibrillators made by a subsidiary, Guidant.

Plaintiffs in those cases are free to stay out of the settlements and try to continue suing the companies. But the odds against their success are much steeper now, according to both plaintiffs and defense lawyers.

The issue in the LaRue case was whether the Employee Retirement Income Security Act permits an individual account holder to sue plan administrators for breaching their fiduciary duties.

The language of the law refers to recovering money for the "plan" rather than for an individual, raising the question of whether a participant can sue solely for himself.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in his opinion for the court, said that such lawsuits are allowed. "Fiduciary misconduct need not threaten the solvency of the entire plan to reduce benefits below the amount that participants would otherwise receive," Stevens said.

The decision overturned a ruling by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va.

Unlike people enrolled in traditional pension plans, employees in 401(k) plans, which have exploded in number in the past two decades, choose from a menu of options on where to invest their money. That puts workers squarely in the middle of decision-making about their pensions and inevitably leads to the kind of disputes LaRue has with his plan's administrators.

"Defined contribution plans dominate the retirement plan scene today," unlike when ERISA was enacted in the mid-1970s, Stevens said.

Many traditional pension plans guaranteeing a fixed monthly benefit have either been frozen or terminated, and 401(k) plans are the main source of retirement income, said the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents 60,000 pilots at 41 air carriers.

The Bush administration argued in support of workers. The government said the appeals court ruling barring LaRue's lawsuit would leave 401(k) participants without a meaningful remedy from any federal, state or local court when plan administrators fail to live up to their duties.

Business groups supported LaRue's employer. They argued that ERISA is aimed at encouraging employers to set up pension plans, while guarding against administrative abuses involving the plan as a whole. The law doesn't permit individual lawsuits like LaRue's, the business groups said.

Congress enacted ERISA after some widely publicized failures by companies and labor unions to pay promised pensions. Workers in class-action lawsuits have long relied on the law, most recently in the scandal-ridden collapses of companies like Enron and its 401(k) plan for workers.

The term 401(k) refers to a section of the Internal Revenue Code.

Participants in 401(k) plans do not know how much money they will receive in retirement. Employees invest a certain amount each month and how much they get back depends on how well their chosen investments have performed.

The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday unanimously rejected provisions of a Maine law that restricts the shipment of tobacco products in the state.

"Despite the importance of the public health objective, we cannot agree with Maine that the federal law creates an exemption," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the court's majority opinion. "The act says nothing about a public health exception."

The ruling determines that federal trucking laws bar state regulation of tobacco shipments, despite Maine's concern that tobacco products might be shipped to minors.

The state law, passed by Maine in 2003, required shippers such as United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) to follow special handling procedures when delivering cigarettes or other tobacco products with the aim of keeping tobacco from being shipped illegally to minors. The industry challenged the provisions, arguing they were onerous, increased costs and ran afoul of the federal limit on state shipping regulations.

Major shipping companies, including UPS and FedEx Corp. (FDX), already have voluntarily agreed not to ship cigarettes in a settlement with New York over tobacco restrictions enacted in that state.

In previous legal action, the Maine law was struck down by a federal trial court. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston affirmed lower-court rulings that held federal shipping laws pre-empted the Maine law. The Supreme Court's opinion affirms the appeals court holding.

In a subsequent search, the sheriff's department found methamphetamine in Herring's pockets and an unloaded gun under the front seat of his truck.

It turned out that the warrant for Herring's arrest had been recalled five months earlier.

Herring was sentenced to 27 months in prison after a jury convicted him on federal drug and gun charges.

Courts have ruled that as a deterrent to police misconduct, the fruits of an unlawful search and seizure may be excluded from evidence.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta said that suppressing evidence in Herring's case would be unlikely to deter sloppy record keeping.

The cost of suppressing the evidence, the appeals court said, would fall on the county that arrested Herring, not on the county that was negligent in its record keeping.