The SCoVA Blog

The Supreme Court of Virginia had three occasions today to consider the concept of reaching the right result for the wrong reason in criminal cases. It issued two opinions based on the issue, using one of them to provide a significant clarification of the concept, and heard arguments in a third case on which the [...]

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Guns – in two different contexts – were a major topic for the Supreme Court of Virginia today. In two cases, the court revisited Virginia Code § 18.2-53.1, the statute that provides for a mandatory penalty of three years for using a firearm in a violent crime. The issues, as they have been in earlier [...]

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The Supreme Court of Virginia will hear arguments on Nov. 1 on whether trial courts in Norfolk and Alexandria properly used extraordinary writs to provide relief for immigrants who otherwise would have been deported because of misdemeanor convictions. Each defendant received a suspended jail term, one for assault and battery and the other for petit [...]

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The Supreme Court of Virginia upheld Friday the lower court holdings in a sexually violent predator case and three criminal appeals. The court heard arguments in the cases last month and resolved the appeals with unpublished orders. In the SVP case, Graves v. Commonwealth, Record No. 100209, a Portsmouth judge admitted the statement of a [...]

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The case of a Norfolk judge who refused to enforce an arbitration clause in a nursing home contract is among the more interesting of the first flush of petitions for appeal granted by the Supreme Court of Virginia after its writ panel session earlier this month. We look at the case, Medical Facilities of America [...]

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Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Melendez-Diaz, the Supreme Court of Virginia has acknowledged Virginia’s former procedure for admission of lab reports in criminal trials failed to safeguard a defendant’s rights under the Confrontation Clause. The decision today in Cypress v. Commonwealth (VLW 010-6-083) means a new trial for one drug defendant, but no [...]

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Senior Assistant Attorney General Leah Darron wanted to talk today about harmless error because the evidence against Anthony Dale Crawford in the death of his estranged wife appeared to be overwhelming. Justices of the Supreme Court of Virginia asked her if that meant she was abandoning a contention that an affidavit the wife submitted to [...]

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Virginia Supreme Court Justice Lawrence L. Koontz Jr. said during oral arguments today “the commonwealth appears to be doing through the back door what it couldn’t do through the front door” in asking for revocation of the probation of a man who entered an Alford plea to a rape charge. The trial judge accepted James [...]

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Charles Edward Reed III might well have been as guilty as a Stafford County Circuit Court jury found him to be in June 2005. But there was a significant problem in the trial for murder and three related counts that netted Reed a sentence of life plus 38 years for what witnesses said was a [...]

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Although faulty eyewitness identification has been the basis for most of the convictions overturned by DNA evidence, it’s tough to get an appellate writ granted, much less have a conviction reversed, when the judge or jury believes the witness. So it was no surprise that Maurice James Ward’s challenge to a robbery victim’s identification of [...]

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