WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled that San Diego, Calif., did not violate a police officer's free speech rights when it fired him for selling a sexually explicit video in which he appeared wearing -- and then removing -- a police uniform.

In an unsigned opinion and without hearing oral arguments, the justices ruled that the officer, who sold police equipment as well as pornographic videos on eBay, could not pursue a federal civil rights action against the city on the grounds that his termination violated his First Amendment right to comment on "matters of public concern."

In other action yesterday, the top court refused to speed up consideration of a challenge to the government's plans to try foreign terror suspects before military tribunals.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was a driver for Osama bin Laden, won his appeal in U.S. District Court. His lawyers wanted to skip an appeals court and have the Supreme Court decide the legality of the trials planned for Hamdan and potentially hundreds of others classified as "enemy combatants" who are being held at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

Yesterday's action by the court does not dismiss the appeal. Justices could still agree to hear the case, but they won't decide until early next year -- potentially too late to hold arguments and issue a ruling before the end of the term in late June.

Also yesterday, the justices also heard arguments in two important criminal cases -- one involving a challenge to Ohio's parole system and the other revisiting the question of whether prosecutors can repeatedly use peremptory challenges to bar African Americans from juries as long as they cite a non-racial reason for the exclusion.

In ruling that San Diego acted properly in terminating the employment of the officer, identified in court papers only as John Roe, the justices reversed a decision of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had likened Roe's activities to the practice of federal employees earning outside income by delivering speeches or writing articles in their spare time.

In 1995, the Supreme Court held that such activities were protected by the First Amendment against an attempt by Congress to limit how much the employees could earn from airing their views as private citizens. But yesterday the high court ruled that similar protection didn't exist for Roe when he capitalized on his job to market sexually explicit materials.

Turning to oral arguments, the court considered whether two prison inmates in Ohio could use a 133-year-old federal civil rights law to challenge what they said were unfair parole proceedings.

Lawyers for William Dwight Dotson, a convicted murderer, and Rogerico J. Johnson, who is serving indefinite sentences for assault and robbery, asked the court to allow their clients to sue the state parole board under Section 1983, a civil rights law passed by Congress after the Civil War.

But a lawyer for the state said the law the prisoners seek to invoke applies only to prison conditions, not to procedures for parole.

Dotson complained that his constitutional rights were violated when stricter rules for parole eligibility enacted after his conviction were applied to him, making him ineligible for parole for several additional years. Johnson made a similar argument about retroactive application of new parole guidelines and also complained that he wasn't allowed to speak or ask questions at his parole hearing.

Under a 1994 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, state prisoners may not file Section 1983 complaints against prison authorities if their claim is based on the contention that their conviction or sentence was invalid. The proper avenue for complaints on unlawful imprisonment, the court said, was to file a writ of habeas corpus.

But John Q. Lewis, a Cleveland attorney representing Johnson, told the Supreme Court yesterday that the 1994 precedent didn't apply because even if his client prevailed in the Supreme Court that would not necessarily shorten his sentence. Representing Dotson, Washington, D.C., lawyer Alan E. Untereiner said that applying revised parole guidelines to his client's case "effectively rescinded" Dotson's eligibility for parole.

Ohio State Solicitor Douglas R. Cole ridiculed the notion that the two inmates were seeking anything other than early release.

In the second case argued yesterday, the lawyer for an African-American inmate in Texas pleaded with the court to set aside his death sentence because prosecutors systematically excluded blacks from his jury.

Representing Thomas Joe Miller-El, who was sentenced to death in the 1985 robbery-murder of a Dallas motel employee, former U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman told the justices that it was "too incredible" to believe that race wasn't the primary factor in prosecutors' decision to exclude 10 African-American jurors from Miller-El's trial.

But Assistant Texas Attorney General Gena Bunn told the court that the African Americans excluded from the jury on a "peremptory challenge" were stricken not because of their race but because their views on the death penalty made them unsympathetic from the prosecution's point of view.

Unlike challenges for cause, in which a prosecutor or lawyer must cite a reason for disqualifying a prospective juror, peremptory challenges historically have required no explanation and have reflected hunches by lawyers about the leanings of potential jurors based on everything from age to appearance to occupation to religious affiliation.

But in 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that peremptory challenges could not be used to exclude members of a particular racial group. Now prosecutors who strike blacks from a jury must be prepared to provide a non-racial motive for such challenges.