• Media Takeout: Veteran media writer Johnnie L. Roberts explains how AOL is trying to reposition itself as a content creator, not on-ramp to the Internet, as it spins off from Time Warner.
  
• Finance Takeout: The New York Times' Louise Story joins us with the latest on the Securities and Exchange Commission's case against three executives from the New Century Financial Corporation.
• Sports Takeout: Our sports contributor, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, looks at last night's Packers/Ravens matchup and looks ahead to the NFL playoffs.

Kristen Lombardi, investigative reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, just completed an in-depth investigation on how college campuses have created judiciary systems to handle rape cases, and how those systems sometimes fail. She talks with us about what she learned while investigating her piece, and shares a first-person account from one woman who feels her rape case was mishandled by her college: former University of Virginia student Kathryn Russell.

We also hear a response from the University of Virginia about what's happened in the aftermath of Russell's case.

To read Lombardi's entire 3-part series on collegiate rape judiciary systems, visit the Center for Public Integrity.

One of the most frequent arguments against allowing the trials of self-professed 9/11 'mastermind' Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four of his accused associates to proceed in civilian court is that the trial will give the men a platform from which to spew anti-American propaganda. Ron Kuby, a criminal defense attorney with experience in terrorism cases, says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will probably toe the al-Qaida party line – speaking out from the stand on whatever is the "issue du jour," be it Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan.

We also spoke with Ed MacMahon, the court-appointed attorney for Zacarias Moussaoui. MacMahon says no federal judge will allow Mohammed, or any of the accused, to act out of turn in court. But that's not the only terror-related news today. A federal judge unsealed charges against eight men who are accused of recruiting young Somali-Americans to join an Islamic insurgency in Somalia. It's a complicated story and to break it down we speak to Abdi Aynte, an editor with Voice of America. Aynte used to cover the Somali community in Minnesota.

Attorney General Eric Holder faced energetic questioning from senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday; our own Todd Zwillich was there, and joins us, along with Matthew Waxman, associate professor of national security law at Columbia Law School.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday defended his decision to try self-professed 9/11 'mastermind' Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in New York City, rather than a military tribunal. In a heated exchange with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Holder speculated on whether this trial will set a precedent for how future terror suspects are treated. At one point, Graham asked whether the U.S. would have to read Osama Bin Laden his Miranda Rights if he was caught. James Cohen, a professor at Fordham Law School who is defending two Guantánamo Bay detainees says that Graham's question made the news, but that it's a moot point.

(click through for a transcript of Holder and Graham's exchange.)

The man who calls himself the 'mastermind' of the 9/11 terror attacks is heading to trial in U.S. federal court. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four of his alleged co-conspirators will be moved from Guantánamo Bay to face trial in lower Manhattan – just blocks away from the World Trade Center site. We speak to Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick about some of the challenges involved in such a trial. We also hear from attorney Jonathan Hafetz, co-editor of "The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law." Hafetz represents Mohamedou Slahi, a Guantánamo detainee who may also be headed to the same civilan court.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and four other men accused in the plot will be prosecuted in federal court in New York City, a federal law enforcement official said earlier today.

Joining us to discuss the implications of this announcement on the president's promise to close Guantánamo Bay is Jonathan Mahler, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of the book "The Challenge: How a Maverick Navy Officer and a Young Law Professor Risked Their Careers to Defend the Constitution — and Won."

A case brought to the Georgia Supreme Court this Tuesday might decide whether Georgia can afford to levy the death penalty any more. Jamie Weis has been sitting in jail for four years waiting for a trial because the state can’t afford to give him adequate representation or his Sixth Amendment-guaranteed right to a "speedy and public trial." Yesterday, Jamie presented a pre-trial appeal — drop his charges, or at least the possibility of the death penalty. 

To find out more we spoke with Emily Green, a reporter covering the justice system for Georgia Public Broadcasting, and Robert McGlasson, an attorney at law who represented a previous death-penalty defendant in one of the most expensive cases in Georgia history. (You can read other stories in our "Deep Cuts" series on states' budget shortfalls.)

Last year, Judge Robert T. Russell, Jr. of Buffalo, N.Y., started the nation's first veterans' court to deal with the specific needs of former military personnel accused of minor crimes. Judge Russell joins us to explain how and why he started the court, while Tom Zabarowski, a former Army enlistee, explains how Judge Russell helped him to regain his life.

The House Judiciary Committee has released almost 6,000 pages of documents that show that Karl Rove the former top political adviser to President George W. Bush played a critical role in the 2006 firings of a number of U.S. attorneys. Do the new documents support a charge of perjury? We talk to New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau.

Two strange bedfellows will face a judge in federal court today: Bank of America and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Takeaway talks to Louise Story, finance reporter for The New York Times.

The Takeaway follows up on a story the show covered in February: the tale of hundreds of children and teenagers sentenced to juvenile detention centers in Pennsylvania. Local judges were participating in a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme for sending teens to privately run youth detention centers. One of those children is 17-year-old Hillary Transue. Her mother Laurene Transue joined The Takeaway in February and is on the show again to talk about the latest events in the case.

White-collar criminals tend to receive different sentences from violent offenders, but a judge in New York gave a guilty executive a really different sentence. He required the former senior vice president to write a book about the nature of his crime. And this isn't a first for the judge: he also made a lobbyist write a tome on his offenses. Judge Ricardo Urbina of the U.S. District Court in Washington joins us this morning to explain his take on justice, restitution, and reform. Judge Urbina is also the judge who ordered the Bush administration to release the 17 Uighurs held at Guantanamo in October of last year. We talked with Judge Urbina about this morning's news that the small Pacific island nation of Palau will resettle these 17 Uigurs.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that judges must recuse themselves from ruling on cases that involve individuals who have spent money to help put the judge on the bench. It sounds like a fairly straightforward ruling. But the decision raises larger questions of just how we elect and appoint judges in this country. For a look at the tricky process of electing judges, The Takeaway talks to Adam Liptak, Supreme Court Correspondent for our partners The New York Times, and to Tom Phillips, a lawyer with Baker Botts in Austin, Texas, who served as the Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1988 to 2004.

Paul Butler was on track for the American dream. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, he was a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice specializing in public corruption. All that changed when he was arrested on charges he claims are false. That's when he decided the system simply didn't work. He is now a law professor at George Washington University and author of Let's Get Free: A Hip Hop Theory of Justice and advocates that the public force major changes in the criminal justice system.

The Supreme Court has set its agenda for the week and will hear arguments on two cases involving civil rights. The first case involves the strip search of a young girl by school administrators hot in pursuit of...ibuprofen. They had received a tip that she was distributing, but turned up nothing in their search of the honor student. While this seems like a blatant and outrageous violation of the girl's fourth amendment rights, the Court has upheld such searches and allows the court to revisit the issue of whether civil rights can be limited at the schoolhouse door in order to protect the health, safety, or morals of the children within.

Next on the docket is a look at affirmative action in practice in the city of New Haven, Connecticut. The court will hear arguments on behalf of several firefighters (mostly white, but one is Latino) who feel that the city violated their rights to equal opportunity for work by eliminating a test that put firefighters who passed the exam on track for promotion. One of the firefighters, who had severe dyslexia, got tutoring and studied for thirteen hours a day and passed it. But no African American candidates on the firefighting force passed it, which prompted the city of New Haven to eliminate the test on the ground that it showed a gross disparity of opportunity for black firefighters than for whites.

Joining The Takeaway to discuss these cases and more is Kenji Yoshino, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Law at NYU law school.

Former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens may walk away from seven felony convictions a free man with a clean record. Yesterday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department is seeking to have Stevens’ verdict thrown out due to prosecutorial misconduct. It will not pursue a new trial and wants all charges dropped. Stevens, the Senate’s longest serving Republican, was convicted in October for lying on financial disclosure forms about gifts. The Takeaway talks to Libby Casey, reporter for Alaska Public Radio Network in Washington, D.C. who has been following the case since last fall, and Steve Heimel, Host of “Talk of Alaska” in Anchorage, Alaska.

In the video below, Stevens' attorney Brendan Sullivan discusses the case.

The United States holds at least 25,000 prisoners in long-term solitary confinement prisons across the country. They're called "Supermax" prisons, where prisoners are confined without human contact for at least 23 hours every day. Should these isolation cells be considered torture?

The Takeaway is joined by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and author of a piece in this week's New Yorker called "Annals of Human Rights". Dr. Gawande writes that we know how monkeys respond when scientists have placed them under solitary confinement: the monkeys become severely disturbed and withdrawn. It's, of course, not ethical to do similar experiments on adult human beings, but Dr. Gawande argues that is exactly what we are doing to tens of thousands of prisoners in Supermax prisons in the United States.

When New York Times National Legal Correspondent John Schwartz was called for jury duty, he Googled the defendant's name because it sounded familiar. When he realized his error, he also realized he wasn't alone. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors serving on legal cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country. The Takeaway talks to John Schwartz about whether trials need to change or whether technology will change trials.

The man who committed perhaps the largest fraud in the history of Wall Street could now spend the rest of his life in prison. Bernard L. Madoff will likely plead guilty tomorrow to all the criminal charges filed against him by federal prosecutors. After nearly 20 years of running a Ponzi scheme that consumed billions of dollars of other people's money, those spurned want their day in court. The Takeaway talks to Diana Henriques, New York Times senior financial writer about the new details that have emerged in the case and what victims want.
For more, read her article Madoff Will Plead Guilty; Faces Life for Vast Swindle in the New York Times.