Attorneys for Rolling Stone magazine are heading back to federal court to try to overturn a jury's defamation verdict over its botched story "A Rape on Campus."

A judge is holding a hearing in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Thursday to consider Rolling Stone's request to throw out the jury's November verdict. The jury awarded University of Virginia administrator Nicole Eramo $3 million after finding Rolling Stone and a reporter defamed her.

The 2014 story told the account of a woman identified only as "Jackie," who said she was gang raped at the school. A police investigation found no evidence to back up Jackie's claims.

The magazine argues, among other things, there's no evidence reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely acted with actual malice. Eramo's attorneys are urging the judge to keep the verdict.

Former NFL star Aaron Hernandez is expected in a Boston courtroom for a pretrial hearing in his upcoming double murder trial.

Hernandez is accused of killing two men he encountered at a Boston nightclub in 2012. Prosecutors say the former New England Patriots tight end followed the men and opened fire on their car at a stop light after one of them accidentally bumped into Hernandez and spilled his drink.

Hernandez is due in Suffolk Superior Court Thursday, when a judge is expected to hear arguments on defense motions. Hernandez's trial is scheduled to begin next month.

Hernandez has pleaded not guilty. He's already serving a life sentence in the 2013 killing of semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd.

The Supreme Court said Monday it won't hear an appeal from three sex trafficking victims who accuse advertising website Backpage.com of helping to promote the exploitation of children.

The justices left in place a lower court ruling that said federal law shields Backpage from liability because the site is just hosting content created by people who use it.

The women say they were sold as prostitutes in Massachusetts and Rhode Island through advertisements for escort services on the site when they were as young as 15. They say Backpage is not protected by the Communications Decency Act because the company not only hosted the ads, but created a marketplace that makes child sex trafficking easier. Backpage has denied those allegations.

The California Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a voter-approved measure intended to speed up the appeals process for the state's Death Row inmates to give it time to consider a lawsuit challenging the measure.

In a one-page decision, the court stayed the "implementation of all provisions of Proposition 66" and set a timeline for filing briefs in the case.

Proposition 66 would change how appeals are handled, appointing more lawyers to take cases, putting certain types of appeals before trial court judges and setting a five-year deadline for appeals to be heard. Currently, it can take longer than that for an attorney to be assigned to a case and upward of 25 years to exhaust appeals.

The lawsuit by former Attorney General John Van de Kamp and Ron Briggs, whose father wrote the ballot measure that expanded California's death penalty in 1978, said the reform measure would disrupt the courts, cost more money and limit the ability to mount proper appeals. They said the deadlines would set "an inordinately short timeline for the courts to review those complex cases" and result in attorneys cutting corners in their investigations.

Supporters of the measure have called the lawsuit a frivolous stall tactic.

California voters faced two death penalty measures on the November election. They rejected a measure that would have abolished the death penalty and narrowly approved Proposition 66.

A Massachusetts woman accused of sending her boyfriend text messages encouraging him to kill himself is due in court for a pretrial hearing.

Michelle Carter is charged with manslaughter in the 2014 death of Conrad Roy III. The 18-year-old Roy died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Prosecutors say the then-17-year-old Carter had sent him dozens of messages urging him to follow through on his suicide plan.

Earlier this month, Carter’s attorney asked a judge for funds to hire an expert to explain the effects of an antidepressant to a jury at Carter’s trial. The judge denied the request.

Carter’s lawyer said both teens were taking an antidepressant that has a warning that it may cause suicidal thoughts.

Carter’s lawyer said he may make additional arguments at a hearing scheduled for Monday.

The Supreme Court is upholding the broad reach of a federal law prohibiting bank fraud.

The unanimous ruling on Monday came in the case of a California man who illegally siphoned about $307,000 out of a Taiwanese businessman's Bank of America bank account.

Justice Stephen Breyer rejected Lawrence Shaw's claim that the law applies only when a defendant intends to cheat the bank itself ? not a bank customer. Breyer said the bank has property interests in the customer's account and that Shaw misled the bank to steal the customer's money.

The justices sent the case back to a lower court to decide whether the jury instructions in Shaw's case were correct.