The Supreme Court has refused to review the case of a British woman on death row in Texas for killing a young mother.

The justices on Monday rejected an appeal from Linda Carty, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing a woman whose child she also snatched in Houston in 2001. Carty has complained that her trial lawyers were deficient.

The British government and human rights groups have aided Carty's cause.

Carty is one of 10 condemned women in Texas. She is a former teacher from St. Kitts in the British Virgin Islands.

In September, a taped voice recording of Carty begging Britons to help save her life was broadcast into London's Trafalgar Square.

The Florida attorney general's office is investigating possible misconduct by a large law firm that files foreclosures for banks, according to a posting on its Web site.

The Web site said the office is looking at whether Florida Default Law Group, based in Tampa, was involved in "fabricating and/or presenting false and misleading documents in foreclosure cases." Mortgage documents that are used to prove a bank has a right to foreclose "have later been shown to be legally inadequate and/or insufficient," the Web site said.

A spokeswoman for Florida Default declined to comment. Ryan Wiggins, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Bill McCollum, said the investigation began last fall.

The civil probe comes as some judges and federal prosecutors in Florida are paying close attention to how banks—and so-called foreclosure-mill law firms that work for banks—are attempting to take control of homes from borrowers in default. Judges across the country have chastised banks and their attorneys for attempting to seize properties they can't prove they own.

Last month, a Florida judge said that a mortgage document filed by a bank in a foreclosure case was part of an "intentional effort to mislead" the court.

When President George W. Bush and his lawyers were insisting the commander in chief had the sole power to run the new "war on terror," Judge Diane Wood sharply criticized that view.

Wood, now on President Obama's list as a possible Supreme Court nominee, wrote in a 2003 Chicago law review article that "in a democracy, those responsible for national security must do more than say ‘trust us, we know best.' " Secret prisons and secret evidence do not comport with the rule of law, she said.

When the Bush administration argued that a Chinese Muslim could be held indefinitely as a Guantanamo Bay prisoner because he had gone to Afghanistan and may have "associated" with the Taliban, Judge Merrick Garland disagreed.

Garland, also on Obama's short list for the Supreme Court, wrote two years ago for the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington that "Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has ‘said it thrice' does not make the allegation true." There was no evidence that the Uighurs were "enemy combatants," he said.

A U.S. senator urged the State Department on Monday to deny entry to the United States for all Russian officials allegedly responsible for the prison death of a lawyer.

Sergey Magnitsky died in November after spending almost a year in jail. He was awaiting trial on tax-evasion charges linked to his work with a British investor barred from Russia because of allegations he was a security risk.

Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., released a letter he wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asking her to deny entry to the United States of several senior officials from the Russian Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service and the Federal Tax Service.

Magnitsky's colleagues and attorney believe the public officials listed by Cardin were involved in the lawyer's death.

"We can take the concrete action to ensure those public officials and others who share responsibility for this crime should be denied entry visas to the United States," Cardin wrote. "Since the death, a number of prison officials have been fired, but no one has been prosecuted for his torture or death, nor for participating in the corruption he exposed."