So far, the Justice Department enforcement effort has focused mainly on a cluster of lawsuits filed on behalf of people living in the United States illegally who said they were improperly refused legal status under the Government amnesty program in the mid-1980's.

B1 Ruling on State Bias Cases The Pataki administration is trying to decide how to respond to a federal judge's ruling that the state had improperly dismissed more than 5,000 complaints of racial, sexual and other bias and had improperly refused to accept 2,400 other cases.

The inmate, Remon Lee, who was sentenced to life in prison, sought a new trial on the ground that the state trial judge had improperly refused to grant a delay after his alibi witnesses had failed to appear.

The court found that the trial judge had improperly refused to allow a government auditor to testify.

Mr. Pataki removed Mr. Johnson from the case in March, saying that the prosecutor, an opponent of the death penalty, had improperly refused to consider capital punishment in the case.

The judge also required the state to take on an additional 2,400 cases that officials had improperly refused to accept.

This year, the State Supreme Court ordered a new trial after finding that the trial judge had improperly refused to caution jurors before their deliberations that cross-racial identifications, as in this case, were often found by scientific studies to be unreliable.

Also, the Social Security Administration would be empowered to prevent Federal courts from reviewing cases in which a person asserted that an administrative law judge had improperly refused to consider "new and material" evidence.

In 1989, founders Andrew Killgore and Richard Curtiss joined other plaintiffs in complaining that the Federal Election Commission had improperly refused to label AIPAC a "political action committee" (PAC) and require AIPAC to disclose the sources and uses of money.

The confusion was evident at the beginning of the argument, when Mr. Frey said the Oregon trial court had improperly refused to use a jury instruction proposed by Philip Morris "which would have told the jury that it was not to punish for harm to nonparties."