The attorney for a Northern California woman who was charged along with her husband in the killing of their son-in-law said Thursday that she plans to plead not guilty and focus her defense on the abuse allegedly perpetrated by the victim.

Shili Chen and her husband Shouyong Zhang, both 77, appeared in court briefly to ask the judge for more time before entering formal pleas. They were both charged Wednesday with murder after authorities say they both shot their son-in-law, Jonathan McKinsey, to death Saturday in a public park. The killing came days before he and the couple's daughter were set for a hearing in a bitter divorce and custody case.

Curtis Briggs, a court-appointed attorney assigned Thursday to Chen's defense, said the court documents he has reviewed raised concerns that McKinsey was rageful and could not control his temper.

"Court documents show Mr. McKinsey was extremely violent and dangerous to his family," he said.

Jennie Otis, a public defender representing Zhang, asked the judge on Thursday that he be medically evaluated, though she did not say for what. Otis declined to comment.

Both required Mandarin interpreters in the courtroom.

McKinsey, a 40-year-old gaming engineer for The New York Times, was killed in the parking lot of a sports complex in Dublin, a city east of San Francisco. A police sergeant was driving nearby and saw him on the ground as witnesses began calling 911 and pointing out the couple in their vehicle, who were still near the scene, Dublin Police Services said in a news release.

Police detained the couple as they were driving away in the parking lot and found a gun in Chen's possession. Prosecutors said Zhang admitted to shooting McKinsey during a later interview, and another firearm was found in the car that he admitted to using during the crime. Prosecutors also said surveillance video was recovered showing both Chen and Zhang shooting the victim.

Court records show McKinsey's killing came during a contentious divorce with his wife, Candice Jang, and a custody battle over the couple's three young children. In petitions for restraining orders filed last year, the couple accused each other of physical, emotional and psychological abuse going back more than a decade. McKinsey, who is transgender, alleged that both Jang and her parents were verbally and physically abusive regarding a gender transition he underwent years ago.

McKinsey was arrested last October and charged with misdemeanor child abuse for allegedly hitting their oldest son. Police said he acknowledged having slapped the child. Prosecutors also charged him with endangering their youngest child after deputies responded to the family's home to talk with him and found their 2-year-old had been left home alone, according to court documents.

McKinsey pleaded not guilty to the charges and alleged in court records that he had been set up by his wife, who had left the house without telling him the child was sleeping in a crib upstairs. He was released from jail on the condition that he complete 12 parenting classes. At the time of his killing, McKinsey was out on bail and had been trying to enter a mental health diversion program.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday let President Donald Trump's administration continue swiftly deporting people to countries other than their own for now, while the justices consider whether the policy is legal.

The apparent 6-3 order temporarily lifts lower court requirements for migrants to get a chance to object before being sent to countries to which they have no ties.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have kept the lower court order in place.

The Trump administration said last week the lower court order forced the cancellation of a deportation flight carrying about 70 people bound for three countries.

The conservative majority has sided with the administration before on the core Trump administration policy, allowing deportation flights to temporarily continue last year.

The court said it will consider several questions: whether the policy is lawful, whether lower courts had the authority to consider the case and issue a sweeping block, as well as other questions the government deems appropriate.

The order "has now allowed the administration to resume sending people to third countries where they may face persecution, torture, imprisonment, or other grave danger," said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and one of the lawyers representing immigrants in the case.

"But today's order does not decide that the government's policy is lawful," she said in a statement. "The Court will hear that question on an expedited schedule."

Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported some 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries, from Liberia to Guyana. The vast majority have been sent to Mexico.

Trump's Republican administration has said that it sends people with final deportation orders to third countries when they can't be returned to their homelands or their native countries won't accept them, including those who have criminal convictions. Those governments provide assurances that people won't be persecuted or tortured, federal attorneys said.

Attorney General Todd Blanche called the policy "an entirely lawful and critical tool for immigration enforcement" in a social media post.

Some migrants, though, have found themselves imprisoned in countries they'd never heard of before their arrivals. Others also face serious safety risks and are left with little choice except to return to the home countries they were fleeing. Many have no criminal convictions and have been found to be at risk of torture or persecution, attorneys for the immigrants said.

The case comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, which has pledged to deport millions of people who are living in the United States illegally.

Before taking over the sprawling Justice Department investigation into foes of President Donald Trump, Joe diGenova decried the lack of progress in bringing indictments.

Five months later, diGenova has left his position without charging a single case, clouding the future of an investigation that has animated right-wing commentators eager to prove an ill-defined theory of a “deep state” conspiracy to take down the Republican president.

Justice Department officials are pressing forward despite diGenova’s departure, with a flurry of subpoenas to former law enforcement and intelligence officials expected to yield grand jury testimony in the weeks ahead at the Fort Pierce, Florida, home court of a favored Trump-appointed federal judge.

Yet whether anyone ultimately will be charged, and for what, remains an open question. Investigators face not only legal hurdles and personnel upheaval but an impatient White House after more than a year of fits and starts.

The investigation known familiarly as the “grand conspiracy” case is the clearest example yet of the Trump administration’s efforts to leverage law enforcement powers to enact retribution on the president’s adversaries. The tumult that has defined the probe exposes a familiar gap between White House demands for speedy action and the Justice Department’s ability to craft the president’s litany of grievances into a prosecutable case.

The investigation has always been a tough task, aiming to knit together separate FBI probes of Trump — including related to Russian election interference and his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida — into a coherent narrative of a government conspiracy. Prior efforts to investigate the investigators have failed to uncover the kind of criminal misconduct the conspiracy probe aims to prove.

“The idea of connecting all those different investigations into one single conspiracy, there’s no basis for that,” retired federal prosecutor Randall Eliason said. “Then, maybe more importantly, there’s no basis for an allegation that any one of them was actually a criminal act against Trump. They’ve all been verified and upheld in one way or another.”

If the mandate is unusual, so, too, was the person picked to lead it. DiGenova, who’s 81, was a top prosecutor in President Ronald Reagan’s administration but had been out of government for decades. He made headlines in 2020 after he said a cybersecurity official who attested to the legitimacy of the election Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden should be “drawn and quartered.” DiGenova apologized after being sued.

A prominent booster of the theory that Trump was victimized by a “deep state” conspiracy, diGenova was appointed in April shortly after Trump ousted Pam Bondi as attorney general after she struggled to prosecute his foes.

The appointment was heralded by Trump allies who regard the probe as a long-awaited reckoning for former officials they believe wronged the president. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who took the reins of the department after Bondi’s firing, also trumpeted diGenova’s arrival, writing on social media: “Welcome to the fight, Joe!”

By Sept. 10, diGenova was gone amid Trump administration frustration with the pace and management of the probe. His parting comments suggested he didn’t see a pathway for imminent indictments. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post.

DiGenova told The Associated Press those comments were taken out of context, adding: “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”

DiGenova was sworn in days after a career national security prosecutor, Maria Medetis Long, was removed from the investigative team after conveying concerns about an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan.

A federal appeals court has ruled that the United States Energy Department exceeded its authority when it ordered a coal-fired power plant in the US state of Michigan to remain open beyond its planned retirement, dealing a setback to the Trump administration's effort to keep ageing coal facilities operating.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled unanimously on Friday that there was no emergency under federal law that justified keeping the 64-year-old JH Campbell Generating Plant online. Energy Secretary Chris Wright invoked emergency powers last year, arguing that the plant was needed to maintain reliable electricity in the region.

President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency in an executive order in January last year, citing demand increases from artificial intelligence and data centre growth.

Judge Cornelia Pillard, writing for the three-judge panel, said the emergency provision of the Federal Power Act was intended as a "narrow, last-resort backstop." She said the authority could be used only when immediate action was required, and states or utilities could not address the problem themselves.

Pillard also described the reversal of the plant's "long and carefully planned retirement" as "disruptive".

The plant, operated by Consumers Energy, had been scheduled to close in May 2025, but the company has continued operations under energy department orders. That has cost about $259m, according to financial filings, with opponents warning that the expense could ultimately fall on families and businesses in midwestern US states.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, whose office joined counterparts in Illinois and Minnesota in challenging the orders, welcomed the ruling. She said the appeals court had "thrown out DOE's order that had zero basis in reality".

The Energy Department defended its use of emergency powers, saying the orders helped prevent blackouts and "likely saved hundreds of lives" during periods of peak demand, particularly during severe winter storms in late January and early February. The department said that during the winter storm peak, coal generation in affected areas increased by 25 percent compared to the previous year.

The Michigan case is one of several legal disputes that have emerged across the country. Secretary Wright issued another emergency order, just hours after the ruling, to a coal plant in Centralia, Washington, to remain in operation. Similar orders have been issued for plants in Indiana, Colorado and Florida, as well as an oil and gas plant in Pennsylvania.

Civil rights advocates on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Texas law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments, teeing up a potential new test of state-sponsored religious expression in classrooms.

Posters featuring the Ten Commandments began going up almost a year ago in classrooms across Texas, which educates about 5.5 million students. An appeals court earlier this year cleared the way for Texas’ law and one in Louisiana, and similar laws have been passed in Arkansas and Alabama.

“This is an issue of nationwide importance because a number of states have been considering these laws in recent years,” said Heather Weaver, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Over two dozen Texas families represented by the ACLU and other groups petitioned the nation’s highest court to hear their challenge after the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in April upheld the Texas law in a 9-8 ruling.

“We would like for the Supreme Court to make clear that singling out Scripture for display in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment,” Weaver said.

The office for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did not immediately comment Monday.

In the families’ Supreme Court brief, their attorneys argue that the law violates basic First Amendment principles governing the separation of church and state.

“The question of whether a state may impose scripture on impressionable, captive-audience children — for nearly every hour of every school day, for up to (13) years — implicates the most fundamental guarantees of the First Amendment and our Nation’s highest ideals,” they wrote.

The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit reversed lower federal court rulings that had blocked some Texas school districts from putting up the posters.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the law, which took effect last September. Because Texas’ law only requires districts to hang the Ten Commandments if they are donated, conservative groups and individuals began dropping off boxes of posters at campuses across the state as the school year began last year.

“No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin,” the 5th Circuit’s ruling says.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.