U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent plans to keep hearing court cases while facing prosecution on charges he fondled a former court employee, according to the chief judge for the Southern District of Texas.

"The only way he doesn't receive cases is if he's no longer a judge," U.S. District Judge Hayden Head Jr. said in Saturday editions of the Houston Chronicle.

Following a Department of Justice investigation, a federal grand jury on Thursday indicted Kent on two counts of abusive sexual contact and one count of attempted aggravated sexual abuse. His attorney, Dick DeGuerin, has said Kent is innocent.

Kent has been ordered to appear before U.S. Circuit Judge Edward C. Prado on Wednesday. DeGuerin said that, by agreement, Kent will be released without bond on his own recognizance.

Kent, a federal judge for 18 years, is not planning to take the day off, according to the newspaper.

"The choice is his," said U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, one of Kent's colleagues in Houston. "After all, he's (presumed) innocent. That's how we work around here."

The indictment came after a Justice Department investigation of Kent that began in November.

The investigation was prompted after Kent's former case manager, Cathy McBroom, accused the judge of repeatedly harassing her over a four-year period. McBroom has said the harassment culminated in a March 2007 incident in Kent's Galveston court chambers, where the judge allegedly pulled up her blouse and bra and tried to escalate contact before being interrupted.

DeGuerin, Kent's attorney, has said that everything that happened between Kent and McBroom was consensual.

McBroom's allegations were first investigated by the Judicial Council of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which reprimanded Kent in September 2007. The council gave no details about the allegations, only saying a complaint alleging sexual harassment had been filed against Kent.

The council ordered the judge to go on leave for four months. Kent still collected his $165,000 annual salary.

McBroom was transferred to Houston, located 50 miles northwest of Galveston, after reporting her allegations.

Kent, as part of his punishment by the judicial council, also was relocated to Houston.

Wayne County Circuit Judge Robert Ziolkowski (zill-KOW-ski) handled other cases Friday before calling Kilpatrick's lawsuit against the governor.

Kilpatrick says he can't get a fair hearing from Granholm because the fellow Democrat held a private meeting in May to try to settle Kilpatrick's criminal perjury case and get him to resign.

The Detroit City Council is asking Granholm to use her constitutional power to remove Kilpatrick from office for misconduct. That hearing is set for Wednesday.

The mayor is accused of misleading council members into approving an $8.4 million settlement with fired police officers.

William Moffitt of Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday filed the lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court. Moffitt was hired by Kilpatrick in February and replaced before Kilpatrick was charged with perjury in March. Moffitt contends in the lawsuit that Kilpatrick has continually refused to pay the bill.

Mayoral spokesman Marcus Reese told the Detroit Free Press it's unfortunate Moffitt decided to air an administrative issue in public, and his office will respond accordingly.

Kilpatrick faces eight felony counts in the perjury case and two felony counts in a separate assault case.

Similar to a retail shop that increases its product lines to meet customer demand, the law firm of Jonathan D'Agostino & Associates, has ventured into additional areas of jurisprudence.

The expansion wasn't part of the original game plan for the 18-year-old firm, which began specializing in personal injury.

"I never wanted to be that law firm that claims they do everything, because I do not believe you can do everything well," said founder Jonathan D'Agostino.

But when his clients indicated a need for other legal services, D'Agostino didn't want to let them down. He brought legal experts, in a variety of specialties, on board.

"We would settle large cases, and clients would ask us to help with estate planning," D'Agostino said.

At other times, he said, personal-injury cases would involve clients who were so injured they didn't have the mental capacity to make decisions or handle their settlements, so the firm would be prompted to draft special-needs trusts.

Today, in addition to personal injury, the Eltingville-based firm offers a range of legal services, including medical malpractice, estate planning, elder law, criminal defense and Social Security disability.

"Rather than refer those types of matters to other firms, we brought in trained and seasoned attorneys to handle things. This also assured our clients the same exceptional service they were used to," D'Agostino said.

The firm's Social Security department grew out of the need to service clients who, due to their injuries, could not return to work.

Attorney Edward Pavia helps clients like these with Social Security paperwork, hearings and appeals.

Now, nearly 15 years later, Echols is hoping to convince the judge who oversaw his original case to grant him a new trial. His attorneys say DNA tests clear him and the two others in prison for the crime.

Attorneys for Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, known to supporters as the "West Memphis Three," were to appear Wednesday before Craighead County Circuit Judge David Burnett, along with the case's original prosecutor.

Together, the lawyers and judge will lay out a schedule for a three-week slate of hearings in September on DNA evidence and claims of juror misconduct in their 1994 trials over the murders of 8-year-olds Steven Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore.

Burnett has barred both prosecutors and defense lawyers from speaking with reporters about the case, saying he was tired of reading about it in the newspapers. It dominated newspapers and television sets throughout Arkansas and the nation after police found the three boys' water-soaked bodies in a drainage ditch a day after their May 5, 1993, disappearance from West Memphis.

The boys' hands were bound to their legs by shoelaces and their bodies showed signs of suffering severe beatings. One boy's body had been mutilated. A month passed and the community posted a $30,000 reward before police arrested the three teens. Misskelley told investigators how he watched Baldwin and Echols sexually assault and beat two of the boys as he ran down another trying to escape.

A separate jury gave Misskelley, who refused to testify against the other two, a life-plus-40-year sentence for the killings. Baldwin received a life sentence without parole after standing trial with Echols, who preened at times during the trial and quoted Shakespeare to reporters. Echols was sentenced to die.

It can hardly come as a surprise that Barack Obama, Harvard Law Class of '91, is popular with lawyers. They've given him $21 million in donations so far, compared with a measly $7 million for Republican rival John McCain.

But like all things Obama, the picture is cloudier than it first appears. Most of Obama's lawyer money came from defense firms. He got the single biggest slug of cash from Kirkland & Ellis, the Chicago law firm that represents Marlboro merchant Philip Morris and asbestos manufacturers, among others. He also co-sponsored a bill designed to cut down on malpractice litigation in 2005, and voted for the Class Action Fairness Act, a law that made it harder for trial lawyers to file some of their most lucrative cases.

Those actions send pangs of doubt through die-hard supporters of the unfettered right to sue, such as Graham Steele, a staff attorney at consumer watchdog group Public Citizen.

If liberals are worried, however, conservatives should be terrified. Whether Obama or McCain wins in November, tort reform appears dead in Washington for at least the next two years. A catchall phrase for legislative measures designed to make it harder for individuals to sue businesses, tort reform has long been a pet project of Republicans. Not coincidentally, it reduces the earning power of plaintiff lawyers, some of the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party.

The detective accused the mayor of pushing another investigator while recently trying to serve a subpoena on a friend of Kilpatrick. The two counts of assaulting or obstructing a police officer are each punishable by up to two years in prison.

"In my almost 20 years, first as a prosecutor and now as an attorney general ... I cannot recall ever seeing let alone hearing of a situation where a police officer trying to serve a subpoena was assaulted," Attorney General Mike Cox said at a news conference.

Kilpatrick spent Thursday night in a one-man jail cell with no TV for violating his bond in a criminal perjury case that has dogged him for months. Then Wayne County Circuit Judge Thomas Jackson altered the ruling of the lower court judge who ordered the mayor to jail.

Jackson said District Judge Ronald Giles went too far by not attaching some kind of cash bond to his ruling.

In order to get out of jail, Kilpatrick must pay a $50,000 cash bond and wear an electronic tether. He won't be allowed to travel.