There is no doubt about the unhappiness of liberals with the current court, which now bears Mr. Bush's unmistakable imprint. They were reeling last week as the court finished up its first full term with Mr. Bush's appointees, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. It was a session marked by a sharp turn to the right in a series of 5-to-4 decisions, from upholding a federal ban on a type of abortion to limiting school districts' ability to use racially conscious criteria to achieve or maintain integration.

Democrats on Capitol Hill and on the presidential campaign trail were furious, especially, some said, because of Mr. Roberts' promises of humility and respect for precedent, delivered repeatedly when he sought confirmation from the Senate. "Given what he said to us," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat and a member of the Judiciary Committee, "my Democratic colleagues and I would never have envisioned the string of decisions that he issued recently."

"He kept stressing modesty, stare decisis, not over-reaching, giving a large amount of weight to precedent, and now he sort of just flicks it off with the back of his hand," said Mr. Schumer, who voted against Mr. Roberts. "People are just shocked."

Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and who voted for Mr. Roberts' confirmation, was equally unhappy. "I am extraordinarily disappointed when I find that, in almost a cavalier way, they've thrown aside Brown vs. the Board the Education," Mr. Leahy said on NBC's "Meet the Press." (That is a characterization that Mr. Roberts, and others, would no doubt dispute.)

But venting only goes so far. People for the American Way, the liberal advocacy group, launched a fund-raising drive this week with an e-mail message sent to 400,000 core activists. "Only you and I stand between the new Supreme Court and the continued chiseling away at the rights and freedoms we Americans hold dear," wrote Norman Lear, one of the founders of the group.

Promising to match every dollar contributed, and to organize around next year's Senate and Presidential campaigns, Mr. Lear concluded, "Together we can take back the court."

Liberals have been warning of the dangers of a Bush court since his 2000 campaign against Al Gore, but it was never an easy issue to drive home, even among people who support much of the progressive agenda, analysts say.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who has studied public attitudes toward the court for Planned Parenthood and other groups, said it takes a long time to penetrate the public's consciousness about the importance of the nine justices.

"They don't know much about the court, they don't understand lifetime appointments, they think each president can have an impact," she added.

Mark Mellman, another Democratic pollster, said that in the past, "people had some confidence that the court was not going to change the way the country did business in dramatic ways."

In other words, liberals were often warning about potential dangers to their agenda from a changing Supreme Court. The issue was not a hypothetical for conservatives, who felt devastated, over the years, by decisions from previous courts, most notably Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case declaring a constitutional right to abortion.

Now, some Democrats and their allies say they are hearing hypothetical worries turn to outrage, and not just in the Democratic cloakroom of the Senate. "The right has always been energized on this issue," said Mr. Schumer. "The recent decisions have now energized the left."

Democratic presidential campaigns quickly weighed in, and the issue is expected to be raised in several Senate races. A prime example is Maine, which has a centrist Republican up for re-election next year, Senator Susan Collins, who voted for both Mr. Alito and Mr. Roberts.

Carol Andrews, communications director for the Maine Democratic Party, foreshadowed the fight to come, saying Ms. Collins' support for Mr. Alito, in particular, "places her squarely in lockstep with ultraconservatives, and far to the right of the center she claims to inhabit."

Steve Abbott, Ms. Collins's chief of staff, countered that the senator takes her responsibilities to advise and consent very seriously, but has no litmus test for judicial confirmations.

Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, said he believes that public attitudes toward the court are "at a tipping point." He said that the cumulative impact of the court's decisions will make it easier to make the case that "you have a court radically to the right of the American people."

Ms. Lake said she could envision an argument aimed at women in the presidential campaign — "that there's a pattern of decisions out here that are out of touch with women's lives, from pay equity to personal decision-making on abortions," she said. "It could be very powerful."

In the meantime, the activist and fund-raising networks are beginning to hum.

“My family would be here had I known that weather radios existed,” said Kathryn Martin, who pushed heavily for the law after the tornado shattered the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park and killed dozens of people, including three of her relatives.

The Indiana regulation is one of hundreds of new laws taking effect on July 1, when most states begin their fiscal years. Among them are efforts to encourage alternative energy in Nevada and Minnesota, tougher rules against illegal immigrants in Georgia and Idaho, and higher minimum wages in Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The Indiana tornado hit before dawn on Nov. 6, 2005, with winds estimated at 200 miles an hour. Twenty of the 25 victims of the storm were in mobile homes on the outskirts of Evansville, where emergency officials said few had radios or access to shelters.

The Indiana General Assembly responded last year, passing the weather-radio proposal with overwhelming support. A similar effort is under way on the federal level to make the radios a requirement nationwide.

The radios, which cost about $30, operate on frequencies dedicated to the weather service. Officials say they often broadcast warnings before regular radio and television stations.

More than 20 million Americans live in mobile homes, according to Census estimates. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found that the fatality rate for residents of mobile homes is 10 times greater than those in homes with fixed foundations.

These are among other laws taking effect on July 1:

- Virginia will require convicted sex offenders to register e-mail addresses with the state.

- Nevada will force certain sex offenders to live at least 1,000 feet from schools and other places where children gather.

- Tennessee will require everyone buying beer at a store to show ID.

- California will ban sales of soda in schools during school hours and put new limits on sugar and fat content in school food.

- Colorado will ban abstinence-only sex education in all schools, except for one district, requiring schools to teach sex education based on scientific research and to include information on contraception.

In Indiana, people riding in back seats and in S.U.V.’s and pickups will have to wear seat belts. The mandatory belt law had a loophole for vehicles with truck plates.

Thursday is probably the Court's last session until October. The school rulings in cases affecting schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle leave public school systems with a limited arsenal to maintain racial diversity.

The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court's judgment. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that was joined by the court's other three liberals.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurring opinion in which he said race may be a component of school district plans designed to achieve diversity.

He agreed with Roberts that the plans in Louisville and Seattle went too far. He said, however, that to the extent that Roberts' opinion could be interpreted as foreclosing the use of race in any circumstance, "I disagree with that reasoning."

The two school systems in Thursday's decisions employ slightly different methods of taking students' race into account when determining which school they would attend.

In the case involving the mentally ill killer in Texas, the court ruled 5-4 in the case of Scott Louis Panetti, who shot his in-laws to death 15 years ago in front of his wife and young daughter.

The convicted murderer says that he suffers from a severe documented illness that is the source of gross delusions. "This argument, we hold, should have been considered," said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion.

Panetti's lawyers wanted the court to determine that people who cannot understand the connection between their crime and punishment because of mental illness may not be executed.

The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution bars "the execution of a person who is so lacking in rational understanding that he cannot comprehend that he is being put to death because of the crime he was convicted of committing," they said in court papers.

In a third case, the Court abandoned a 96-year-old ban on manufacturers and retailers setting price floors for products. In a 5-4 decision, the court said that agreements on minimum prices are legal if they promote competition.

The ruling means that accusations of minimum pricing pacts will be evaluated case by case. The Supreme Court declared in 1911 that minimum pricing agreements violate federal antitrust law.

Until yesterday, the nation has had an unusually competitive retail market, in part because antitrust laws made it illegal for sellers or manufacturers to agree on fixed prices. The Supreme Court, in a 1911 case involving a Dr. Miles and his patented medicines, had said that price-fixing agreements between manufacturers and retail sellers were flatly illegal.

The rule's practical effect was to discourage a manufacturer from setting a price -- leading, for instance, to stickers on new cars that list the "manufacturer's suggested retail price." However, in yesterday's opinion, the high court described this rule as out of step with modern economics.

The case posed the issue of how insane a person must be before a death sentence becomes unconstitutional, and the ruling came at the end of the Supreme Court's term.

At trial, Mr. Panetti, now 49, insisted on representing himself. He wore a purple cowboy costume, tried to subpoena Jesus, the pope and John F. Kennedy, and testified in the persona of his alter ego "Sarge." He'd been hospitalized 14 times for mental illness in the decade before the murders, at his in-laws' Fredericksburg home.

Lawyers handling his appeal argued few, if any, death row inmates are as mentally incompetent and that putting him to death would amount to "mindless vengeance" with no retributive purpose.

Four lower courts did find him competent to stand trial, and a jury rejected his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a 5-4 majority, found that Mr. Panetti's mental illness is so severe that it should have been considered.

"Someone who is condemned to death for an atrocious murder may be so callous as to be unrepentant; so self-centered and devoid of Compassion as to lack all sense of guilt; so adept in transferring blame to others as to be considered, at least in the colloquial sense, to be out of touch with reality," Justice Kennedy wrote, but Mr. Panetti's problem isn't merely "a misanthropic personality or an amoral character. It is a psychotic disorder."

At oral arguments in April, justices wrestled with the puzzling situation of an inmate who knows he's been convicted, knows what he's convicted for, knows the state plans to punish him – but suffers from a delusion that makes him ascribe satanic motives to the authorities.

Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, arguing for the prosecution, urged justices to focus on the central fact – essential to a legal finding of mental competence -- that Mr. Panetti understands that he is guilty of murder and that he faces execution for that murder.

The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the National Alliance on Mental Illness had all urged the Supreme Court to spare Mr. Panetti, arguing that regardless of current legal definitions, if a person has a mental disorder that "significantly impairs his or her capacity to understand the nature and purpose of the punishment," that person isn't competent to be executed.

Gregory Wiercioch, an attorney with Texas Defender Service who argued Mr. Panetti's case, lauded the ruling.

"The Supreme Court recognized that executing Scott Panetti would be a mindless, meaningless, and miserable spectacle," he said. "The Supreme Court today reaffirms the wisdom of a legal principle nearly a thousand years old – that the execution of persons like Scott Panetti serves no purpose and offends our sense of decency and common humanity."

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the four dissenters, criticized the majority's refusal to defer to lower courts regarding Mr. Panetti's mental competence, especially in the absence of evidence that his condition has worsened since his conviction – a contention Mr. Panetti's lawyers dispute.

Justice Thomas accused the court's majority of offering a "half-baked holding" that doesn't clarify standards for findings of legal insanity – leaving, instead, muddled guidelines for lower courts to sort through.

He argued that the only workable standard would be the one offered 20 years ago by Justice Lewis Powell, in a concurring in another mental competency case that left the court even more badly divided. Justice Powell wrote that no one should be executed unless they perceive "the connection between his crime and his punishment" – the standard Mr. Cruz had urged on the court.

The Panetti case is one of a number of Texas death row cases the Supreme Court has scrutinized this term.

In April, a 5-4 court threw out sentences for three killers whose juries, in choosing between execution and life in prison, weren't explicitly allowed to weigh mitigating factors such as childhood abuse.

The court's finding that meant a reprieve for three Texans, including LaRoyce Smith, who killed the night manager at a Dallas Taco Bell where he'd worked. He was a 19-year-old ninth-grader with an IQ of 78.

At the time of trial, Texas law gave juries a two-part test: if the conduct was deliberate, and the defendant posed an ongoing threat to society, the sentence would be death. Those rules were in use during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Legislature added a third test in 1991, asking juries to explicitly consider mitigating factors.

The Supreme Court threw out the Smith sentence on a 7-2 vote in 2004, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals defied the justices, asserting as it had previously that the lack of a the third jury instruction was harmless. The Supreme Court rejected that snub in April. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, caustically asserting that the Texas court suffered "confusion" and an inability to follow directions.

At the same time it threw out the Smith death penalty, the Supreme Court gave reprieves to two other Texas inmates whose appeals on the grounds had come up through the federal courts: Brent Ray Brewer, who stabbed a 66-year-old man and robbed him of $140, and Jalil Abdul-Kabir, who robbed a 66-year-old man who was walking his dog in San Angelo in 1988, strangled him with the leash and got $20.

Fifty Texas inmates were sent to death row under the flawed jury instructions, and within a week of the Smith ruling, the Supreme Court gave a near last-minute reprieve to another of them, Ronald Chambers, a Dallas man who has spent 31 years awaiting execution for a 1975 abduction-murder of a college student. He'd been convicted and sentenced to death three times.

The cases led many legal experts to view a growing sense of dissatisfaction on the Supreme Court over the way Texas has handled the death row process.

Though Jobe is not identified in the court records in the Ketner case, she said she was falsely described in the document and has been identified by name by several El Paso-area media outlets.

She has alleged defamation and civil conspiracy, charging that Ketner worked with federal prosecutors and investigators to concoct false allegations against her and others. Jobe demanded a jury trial and has not specified how much money she is seeking.

Jobe's lawyer, Leon Schydlower, was in court Tuesday and could not immediately be reached for comment.

Ketner's San Antonio lawyer, Joel Perez, has said he did not anticipate representing Ketner in the civil suit. Telephone numbers listed for Ketner have been disconnected.