Clerk Mike Johnston prays twice a day, once each morning and once each night, and asks the Lord to understand the decision he made to license same-sex marriage.

“It’s still on my heart,” said Johnston, whose rural Carter County sits just to the east of Rowan County, where clerk Kim Davis sparked a national furor by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, a decision that landed her in jail.

Johnston is one of Kentucky’s 119 other clerks, many of them deeply religious, who watched the Kim Davis saga unfold on national television while trying to reconcile their own faith and their oath of office. Sixteen of them sent pleading letters to the governor noting their own religious objections. But when forced to make a decision, only two have taken a stand as dramatic as Davis and refused to issue licenses.

And others say they find the controversy now swirling around their job title humiliating.

“I wish (Davis) would just quit, because she’s embarrassing everybody,” said Fayette County Clerk Don Blevins, whose office serves the state’s second-largest city, Lexington.

After the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in June, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear ordered clerks across the state to issue licenses, launching them along markedly different paths. The clerk in Louisville, Bobbie Holsclaw, issued licenses that very day and the mayor greeted happy couples with bottles of champagne.

A federal appeals panel has upheld the convictions and sentences of a couple charged with enslaving a mentally disabled woman in their northeast Ohio home for nearly two years through intimidation, threats and abuse.

The three-judge 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Cincinnati agreed unanimously Tuesday that the federal charges were appropriate and that the prison sentences of at least three decades each were warranted.
A federal jury in Youngstown convicted Jessica Hunt and boyfriend Jordie Callahan last year on counts of forced labor, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and conspiracy to illegally obtain prescription drugs.

Among other challenges in their appeal, the couple contended that the case should have been a state matter since federal forced labor prosecutions typically involve people brought to the U.S. for domestic servitude or sex trade.

The woman "was compelled to perform domestic labor and run errands for defendants by force, the threat of force, and the threat of abuse of legal process," Judge Eric Clay wrote.

"Because this is a distinct harm that is a matter of federal concern pursuant to the Thirteen Amendment, it matters little that defendants' conduct may have also violated various state laws," Clay wrote, citing the U.S. constitutional amendment that abolished slavery.

The couple was accused of holding the woman captive from early 2011 to late 2012. Prosecutors alleged that they threatened to harm the woman's young daughter if the woman did not do chores, shop and clean up after their pit bull dogs. The couple also used the dogs and a python to threaten the woman into complying, prosecutors said.

The website Backpage.com may not be immune from state liability law and a lawsuit filed by three young girls who said they were sold as prostitutes on the website can proceed to trial, the Washington Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
 
In a 6-3 decision, the justices said the federal Communications Decency Act does not protect Backpage from state lawsuits because of allegations that the company didn't just host the ads, but helped develop the content.

"The plaintiffs before us have been the repeated victims of horrific acts committed in the shadows of the law," said Justice Steven Gonzalez, writing for the majority. "They brought this suit in part to bring light to some of those shadows: to show how children are bought and sold for sexual services online on Backpage.com in advertisements that, they allege, the defendants help develop."

The case should proceed because the girls have alleged facts that, if proved, would show that Backpage helped produce illegal content, the justices said.

A state death row inmate is going back to a north Mississippi courtroom to again fight for a new trial.

The Mississippi Supreme Court has ordered a Lowndes County judge to determine if the results of post-conviction DNA testing raise enough questions to justify a new trial for Eddie Lee Howard Jr. Howard, now 61, who was convicted and sentenced to death in the slaying of 84-year-old Georgia Kemp of Columbus. Evidence against him included bite marks on her body.

The Supreme Court, in the order signed Thursday by Chief Justice Bill Waller Jr., makes no specific mention of Howard's challenge to the bite mark evidence that the inmate argues is now widely discredited in legal circles.

Waller's order directs the trial court to hold a hearing to determine if Howard's arguments of newly discovered evidence including the results of DNA testing could "probably produce a different result or induce a different verdict if a new trial is granted."

The court's order does not disclose what the DNA testing revealed. Howard's attorneys argue in briefs that DNA results do not connect Howard to the crime.

Howard was convicted of raping and fatally stabbing Kemp in 1992. He was sentenced to death.

Two Zimbabweans arrested for illegally hunting a protected lion named Cecil were in court on Wednesday as anger at the kill by an American dentist escalated.

"If, as has been reported, this dentist and his guides lured Cecil out of the park with food so as to shoot him on private property ... he needs to be extradited, charged, and, preferably, hanged," People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said in a statement Wednesday. The statement, emailed to The Associated Press, came from Ingrid Newkirk, president of the animal rights organization.

Social media on the internet — for example on Twitter under #cecilthelion — were also filled with condemnation of the killing of the black-maned lion just outside Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwean men — a professional hunter and a farm owner — are accused of helping Walter James Palmer hunt the lion. Zimbabwean police said they are looking for Palmer, who reportedly paid $50,000 to track and kill the animal.

During a nighttime hunt, the men tied a dead animal to their car to lure the lion out of a national park, said Johnny Rodrigues, chairman of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force. The American is believed to have shot it with a crossbow, injuring the animal. The wounded lion was found 40 hours later, and Palmer shot it dead with a gun, Rodrigues said.

Palmer, a dentist living in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie, said in a statement that he was unaware the lion was protected, relying on local guides to ensure a legal hunt.

The Texas Court of Criminal of Appeals halted the scheduled lethal injection of Clifton Lamar Williams until questions about some incorrect testimony at his 2006 trial can be resolved.

Williams, 31, had faced execution Thursday evening for the killing of Cecelia Schneider of Tyler, about 85 miles east of Dallas. Investigators determined she had been beaten and stabbed before her body and her bed were set on fire.

In a brief order, the court agreed to return the case to the trial court in Tyler to review an appeal from Williams' attorneys. They want to examine whether incorrect FBI statistics regarding DNA probabilities in population estimates cited by witnesses could have affected the outcome of Williams' trial.

"We need time to look at this," said Seth Kretzer, one of Williams' lawyers. "No way we can investigate this in five hours.

"It requires some time, and the CCA saw that."

The Texas Department of Public Safety sent a notice June 30 that the FBI-developed population database used by the crime lab in Texas and other states had errors for calculating DNA match statistics in criminal investigations. The Texas Attorney General's Office informed Williams' attorneys of the discrepancy on Wednesday.

Prosecutors in Tyler, in Smith County, had opposed Williams' appeal for a reprieve, telling the appeals court the state police agency insisted that corrected figures would have no impact. Williams is black, and prosecutors said the probability of another black person with the same DNA profile found in Schneider's missing car was one in 40 sextillion. Jurors in 2006 were told the probability was one in 43 sextillion. A sextillion is defined as a 1 followed by 21 zeros.