The VLW Blog

At least one judge welcomes objections that bring to mind a long forgotten paean to a brand of cheap beer.
The judge is Roanoke’s Cliff Weckstein and the beer is Ballantine.
As several dozen lawyers listened, Weckstein today described the ideal trial objection: “Precisely right and crystally clear.”  As Weckstein noted, the phrase comes from a decades-old [...]

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The jury hearing the case against a man accused of running down and killing a Roanoke lawyer will not get to hear about a similar vehicle assault that occurred two days later.
Circuit Judge William Alexander excluded the evidence late today in the trial of Jeffery Young, the man charged with murder in the death of [...]

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The Supreme Court of Virginia could decide to give podiatrists some respect in the arena of medical evidence.
Podiatrists, like chiropractors, are not medical doctors, although they are trained and licensed to treat specific conditions.  Unlike chiropractors, however, podiatrists do not have a special statute in the Virginia Code allowing them to testify about what causes [...]

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As Roanoke lawyers pondered the prospects for an official Virginia Code of Evidence last week at a bench-bar conference, presenter John Oakey recalled the variations in trial gatekeeping by Virginia’s federal judges prior to the establishment of federal rules of evidence.  Judge Robert Merhige, he said, tended to follow the Virginia evidence law that he [...]

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Prosecutors have been twice burned this week by apparent mishandling of their video evidence.
First we learned about a cross-examination that weakened the prosecution’s re-enactment video in a Chesapeake murder case.  Now comes word that video bungling has brought a mistrial in another murder case, this one in Henrico.
In the Chesapeake trial of a man charged [...]

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Sharon Nelson of Sensei Enterprises Inc., the Fairfax-based computer forensics firm, and her husband/business partner John Simek were in Grundy recently to deliver a talk at the Appalachian School of Law.
Sharon and John went to talk about marketing one’s self online, including a number of warnings about employers using Facebook to check on applicants. The [...]

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The Virginia Judicial Council sent to the Supreme Court of Virginia today a formal set of Rules of Evidence and a proposed Part Nine to the Supreme Court’s rules that would regulate access to private information in court records.
The proposed Rules of Evidence are the result of more than 20 years of off and on [...]

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Here’s a nugget for the employment bar from Banks v. Mario Industries of Virginia Inc., decided today by the Supreme Court: Disclaimers about no expectation of privacy in the use of company computers will be upheld, and attorney-client privilege is no help to an ex-employee on the point.
The Banks case was a business-tort claim [...]

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