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" We had one gamecock with his windpipe exposed , another with a bone sticking out of his wing and another with a chest wound so bad that you could see his organs moving inside his chest cavity , " said Goodwin , who went with officers from the Mecklenburg County sheriff 's department in last weekend 's raid.Cockfighting has been banned in 48 states , including Virginia , not only for its brutality but also because of the prevalence of gambling , often with tens of thousands of dollars at stake . " Television Viewing and Risk of Sexual Initiation by Young Adolescents " by Sarah L. Ashby , Christine M. Arcari and M. Bruce Edmonson . It overturned a $ 4 million punitive-damage award to an Alabama man who had sued a BMW dealer for selling him a repainted car instead of a new one.For the first time , the court declared that the constitutional right to due process of law meant that companies may not be subject to disproportionate punitive damages.In 2003 , the court broadly defined what qualifies as an excessive award , suggesting that punitive damages should normally be no more than nine times as large as compensatory damages . The court , which last year rejected a challenge to a similar Alabama law , denied the appeal without any comment.The justices rejected an appeal brought by Jonas and Tiffany Eklund , who contended that the Byron Union School District , east of San Francisco , violated constitutional guarantees separating church and state when it required students in a world history class to read pages from the opening chapter of the Koran and study Islam 's Five Pillars of Faith in a unit on Muslim culture . " You know , it 's like saying everybody can have a meal but only people with separate skin can get the dessert , " he said.In the cases at issue - - Parents Involved in Community Schools Inc. v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County ( Ky. ) Board of Education - - both systems offer parents and students a choice of schools , partly to achieve a level of integration that would n't otherwise be possible because of racially segregated housing patterns . George Mason University students will be working with Aptima Inc. , a company that studies the interaction between technology and human behavior , on ways to improve military training.Aptima , a Massachusetts company with an office in the District , was awarded eight grants from the Department of Defense . " But it is very much an open question whether U.S. District Judge Simeon T. Lake III will let Skilling remain free pending an appeal , as defense lawyers recently requested , or whether he will order him into Bureau of Prisons custody immediately on Monday afternoon.The judge closed the book on the criminal case against Lay on Tuesday by tossing out his conviction on 10 charges because he died before he could appeal . Some are full-fledged arenas enclosed in buildings , he said , and others are little more than " brush pits , " set up in rural clearings for smaller crowds.Goodwin played down the Latino connection , noting that the Mecklenburg location " was a Latino pit , but there are Caucasian pits as well . All 50 states and the District of Columbia yesterday urged the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that they said would give federal authorities the ability to block states from prosecuting financial institutions for predatory lending practices.In oral arguments , the justices posed tough questions about the implications of a mortgage-lending case that could affect the way state-chartered subsidiaries of national banks are regulated . The case is Skakel v. Connecticut , 06-52.The court also declined to review author Lewis Perdue 's contention that the blockbuster novel " The Da Vinci Code " is substantially similar to his own book , " Daughter of God . " We have become a magnet for this , " said John Goodwin of the Humane Society of the United States , whose investigative work led to the raid last weekend in Mecklenburg County .