The VLW Blog

Mistakenly telling a client that his criminal conviction won’t force his departure from U.S. shores can let the client overturn the conviction, as a new federal case illustrates. Alexandria Senior U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III granted a Pakistani citizen’s § 2255 motion to vacate his conviction of operating an illegal gambling business in violation [...]

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Amy Tisinger was sworn in yesterday as the first female judge on the general district bench in Shenandoah County. She replaces Judge Norman Morrison, who is retiring, reports the Northern Virginia Daily. For the past 10 years, Tisinger has been a prosecutor with the commonwealth’s attorney’s office, and spent four years working for William B. [...]

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A persistent police officer who decided to enter a darkened house to investigate suspicious circumstances is vindicated as an appeals court accords him immunity from a lawsuit by homeowners who claimed they were startled by the officer’s intrusion. The decision by a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the ruling of [...]

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Virginia State Bar President Jon D. Huddleston sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission today objecting to the inclusion of lawyers among those subject to regulation under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) of 2003. The Red Flag Rules adopted under the law require creditors to develop written programs to identify, detect [...]

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The remand of the Supreme Court of Virginia’s ruling in Magruder v. Commonwealth appeared to be the most likely result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday on the application of the Confrontation Clause to lab reports. The U.S. Supreme Court said, in essence, that an affidavit by a lab technician is no substitute [...]

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The unhip PC promoter may be losing out in the Mac v. PC commercials, but PCs appear to be clear winners with Virginia lawyers. In the results of a tech survey released today by the Virginia State Bar, only 9.3 percent of the 300 survey respondents use a Mac operating system, while 82.2 percent use [...]

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To mark the law firm’s 100th anniversary, each of Williams Mullen’s 297 lawyers pledged to donate 100 hours of time this year to public service or pro-bono work. The firm was established in Richmond in 1909 by Lewis C. Williams and James Mullen, reports The Virginian-Pilot, but didn’t expand beyond the capital city until 1992. [...]

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Former Fairfax County Circuit Judge Burch Millsap died on June 6 of lung disease. He was 85. Born in Missouri, Judge Millsap served in the Army Air Forces during World War II as an airplane mechanic. He graduated from law school at American University in 1950. Judge Millsap was appointed to the court in 1968 [...]

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Stafford County lawyer Thomas M. “Mack” Moncure died on Saturday. A native of Stafford, Mr. Moncure attended the College of William & Mary for both undergraduate and law school, according to his obituatry in The Free Lance-Star. During WWII, he served briefly in the Army Air Corps and later served as a U.S. Marine officer [...]

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Forensic scientists may be more frequent visitors to Virginia courtrooms as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday that laboratory reports are testimonial evidence and therefore invoke the Confrontation Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The court split 5-4, with Justice Scalia, the author of Crawford v.Washington, the 2004 opinion that rewrote the concept of [...]

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