On New Year's Day, incumbent District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal was the presumptive Republican nominee hurtling toward his third term with more than $130,000 in his war chest.
Five days later, Rosenthal had bowed out and four lawyers raced to Republican headquarters, filing fees in hand, to throw their hats into the ring.

A month later, campaign finance reports for the Republican candidates show two pulling ahead. Only one Democrat is seeking the office.

District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal has hired former U.S. Attorney Ron Woods to represent him while the Texas attorney general investigates whether Rosenthal broke the law by using his county computer for political campaigning.

County taxpayers, meanwhile, are paying for other lawyers to defend Rosenthal from an effort to have him held in criminal contempt for deleting e-mail that had been subpoenaed for a civil lawsuit.

Rosenthal didn't return calls for comment.

Rosenthal First Assistant Bert Graham said the office continues to cooperate with the state investigators, who have spent most of their time speaking with the department's computer technicians.

Woods' confirmation that he is now working for Rosenthal comes almost a week after attorneys for the county's top prosecutor halted a contempt hearing in which Rosenthal admitted making erroneous statements in a sworn affidavit about deleting several hundred e-mails.

Attorneys who aren't involved in the case but were in the courtroom to hear the testimony have suggested Rosenthal's lawyers want time to review his sworn statements and shield him from a possible perjury charge.

Woods attended the hearing before U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt, but sat in the gallery, not at the defense table.

Woods said he wasn't consulting on the contempt allegations, but that he had read the transcript from the hearing.

Faces jail, fine

Hoyt has yet to reschedule the hearing, and has asked attorneys on both sides to turn in briefs today explaining the judge's discretion in contempt proceedings.

If found in contempt, Rosenthal could face up to six months in jail and a fine.

Rosenthal is being represented in the contempt proceedings by Ron Lewis, who is paid by the county with a cap of $50,000.

County commissioners approved the contract, in which Lewis also represents two of Rosenthal's administrators, on Dec. 18.

Woods said he is being paid by Rosenthal.

Rosenthal's legal problems began when his e-mail was subpoenaed by Lloyd Kelley, a plaintiff's attorney representing two brothers who say they were falsely arrested by sheriff's deputies after videotaping the deputies executing a search warrant.

Rosenthal turned over more than 800 messages, 130 of which were claimed to be privileged. That e-mail, which included lovelorn messages to his executive assistant Kerry Stevens, was mistakenly made public by Judge Hoyt.

The remaining e-mail messages, which contained racist jokes and sexually explicit images, were later released after Hoyt said he hadn't ordered them sealed.

Thought backups existed

Rosenthal said he deleted about 2,500 messages in one day after he thought one of his attorneys had saved them. He signed an affidavit that he deleted all e-mail that existed before a certain date.

In court, however, Rosenthal testified that he selectively deleted e-mail without regard to date — a contradiction that Kelley hammered on during 45 minutes of testimony.

Thursday, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee announced that she asked U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in a House Judiciary Committee hearing, to launch an investigation into whether Rosenthal misused government resources by sending sexually explicit, racist and political messages.

A Department of Justice spokesperson declined comment.

More than 190 years of federal legal history will be rolled out Feb. 14 at the first reunion of lawyers who have served in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Michigan.

The office, dating to 1815 and serving about 6.7 million residents in 34 counties, has been a professional home to Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Michigan Supreme Court Justices Stephen Markman and Maura Corrigan, ex-U.S. Sen. Phil Hart and U.S. Supreme Court Justices Frank Murphy and Henry B. Brown.

About 300 current and former office members are expected to attend the dinner when retired Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Ross Parker will unveil the histories and portraits of the 51 people who have served as the U.S. attorney in Detroit.

"We want to highlight the proud legacy of one of the finest United States attorney's offices in the nation," said current U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Murphy.

Dick Thornburgh, a former U.S. attorney general and Pennsylvania governor, will be the keynote speaker

In recent days, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey has voiced opposition to the early release of hundreds of federal inmates convicted of dealing crack cocaine, saying the move would unleash a potential crime wave in communities across the country. He reiterated his concern Thursday at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

But some U.S. attorney offices around the country may not be getting the message.

In at least three cases, federal prosecutors have supported efforts to win inmates reduced sentences. Two of the cases are in the Portland, Ore., area, where one inmate is thought to have been released. A third defendant, jailed in Massachusetts, could be released this summer.

The disconnect between Justice Department policy and how new sentencing guidelines are being applied in some cases suggests the issue may be more complex than the attorney general has indicated.

Under rules approved in December, as many as 19,500 federal inmates may qualify for reduced sentences they received for dealing crack cocaine.

The move by the U.S. Sentencing Commission culminated a two-decade debate about the wisdom of punishing crack dealers more severely than those involved with powder cocaine. The debate was fueled by concerns that crack laws were unfairly affecting African Americans, who constitute 9 out of 10 crack defendants.

Mukasey has focused on the 1,600 inmates who officials estimate could be eligible for release when the rules go into effect March 3. He has called the idea especially ill-advised at a time when violent crime is rising in some U.S. cities.

"Many of these offenders are among the most serious and violent offenders in the federal system," Mukasey said Thursday. Their release, he said, would produce "tragic but predictable results." He has also expressed concern that many will not have received the job training or drug treatment they need to stay out of trouble.

Mukasey has called on Congress to intervene. Justice Department officials have indicated they would like to limit the reduced sentences to first-time, nonviolent offenders, or to those with little or no history of crime.

Peter A. Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, said Thursday that there should be no confusion about where the department stands. "The department's policy on retroactivity is laid out in the attorney general's statement before Congress," he said.

But even some Justice Department officials see little chance that the Democratic Congress would approve such legislation. Opponents say the move would be unfair to defendants who have already served long sentences.

Justice Department officials signaled at a conference on the new guidelines last month that they would do their part to implement the rules fairly -- a view that appears to contrast with the hard line that Mukasey has recently adopted.

Some U.S. attorneys outside the Beltway are already helping implement the rules.

In Portland, the U.S. attorney's office supported reduced sentences for defendants in two cases, even before the guidelines were set to go into effect.

Kent Robinson, first assistant U.S. attorney in Portland, said the office backed the early release in one case because the defendant was already living in a halfway house.

It was the second time the government had given a break to Felton Howard Jr., the defendant in the case, according to court records. Howard faced a mandatory five years in prison when he was first sentenced in 2006, but served just 18 months because he had cooperated with federal authorities.

The other Oregon defendant, Octabian Jamar Riley, was sent to prison in 2004 for selling crack and carrying a .45-caliber handgun.

On the surface, he seemed to be just the sort of armed criminal that Mukasey was concerned about. But Riley won't be hitting the streets any time soon. Robinson said federal officials had turned over Riley to the state of Oregon to face separate charges.

Robinson said that it was an oversight to process the claims before March 3, and that he was unaware at the time that the Justice Department had a policy against it. "We mistakenly let those slip through before the national policy to oppose release [before March 3] was clear to us," he said.

"Both represented rather extraordinary circumstances," he added. He said the office was now opposing any early release requests until at least March 3.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Boston shaved 15 months off the sentence of another convicted crack dealer, court records show.

The defendant, Deborah Woodard, had originally been convicted of possessing more than 50 grams of crack with intent to distribute, and was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison.

The decision by U.S. District Judge William G. Young to trim her sentence followed a request last month by Woodard's public defender.

After receiving the request, Young asked the government for its view on giving Woodard a break. The U.S. attorney's office in Boston responded by joining in the request, court records show.

"My understanding is that the attorney general's concerns became known after the motion was filed, and our response was due," said Christina Dilorio-Sterling, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Boston.

Woodard could be eligible for release in June.

This is a brief introduction to Lemon Laws in all United States of America.

Lemon laws are United States state laws that remedies to consumers for cars that repeatedly fail to meet certain standards of quality and performance. These cars are called lemons. The federal lemon law (the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act) protects citizens of all states. State lemon laws vary by state and may not necessarily cover used or leased cars. The rights afforded to consumers by lemon laws may exceed the warranties expressed in purchase contracts. Lemon law is the common nickname for these laws, but each state has different names for the laws and acts.

In California, lemon laws cover anything mechanical, as do the federal lemon laws. The federal lemon law also provides that the warranter may be obligated to pay your attorney fees if you prevail in a lemon law suit, as do most state lemon laws.