The VLW Blog

Here’s one way to keep the populace happy: Don’t have them jump into a federal jury pool when they likely will not have to serve. That “juror utilization” metric is something court administrators track, and the Federal Judicial Center has announced that Virginia’s Western District was one of five federal courts that improved its juror [...]

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Model jury instructions for federal courts have been beefed up in an effort to deter jurors’ use of social media during trial, according to the U.S. Judicial Conference. The new guidelines spell out in more detail the consequences for jurors when the court discovers a juror has used cell phones, smartphones or other devices to [...]

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A juror’s use of Wikipedia to research an element of a criminal offense violated a defendant’s right to a fair trial on illegal “cockfighting” charges, and the defendant should be retried, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said on April 20. Defendant Scott Lawson and others were charged with violating a federal animal fighting [...]

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Is it proper for a judge to reveal a jury verdict to lawyers before it is announced in open court? The Daily Press puts this practice into question after a recent criminal trial in Hampton Circuit Court. After the verdict was handed down in Deshawn Goodwin-Godfrey’s second-degree murder trial, a reporter observed the deputy commonwealth’s [...]

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D.C. Superior Court Judge Ann O’Regan Keary saw a familar face in the jury pool during voir dire on Wednesday: Her husband Tom. She knew Tom was on jury dury and they had joked it would be funny if he ended up in her courtroom. On his questionairre, Tom circled “yes” when asked if he [...]

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A federal jury in Richmond has awarded $212 million, including $200 million in punitive damages, to a Fredericksburg-area man who suffered severe medical complications from the drug Botox. Douglas Ray Jr. received an injection of the drug to treat a hand tremor and writer’s cramp. He alleged that complications from that injection resulted in total [...]

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The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed today the largest jury verdict in Virginia in 2009, a $13.5 million false advertising judgment for PBM Products LLC, the Virginia-based manufacturer of store-brand baby formula. The verdict was against Mead Johnson & Company, the manufacturer of Enfamil baby formula. PBM contended that Mead Johnson had engaged [...]

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A West Virginia judge handed out $50 fines for eight citizens who failed to show up for a recent scheduled trial. The large number of no-shows forced a mistrial in a burglary case, and the victim has since died. Fayette County Circuit Judge John Hatcher said he had two jurors in tears as they appeared [...]

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Forget internet invasions of the jury’s inner sanctum. Jurors in North Carolina went old school. During a break in deliberations over murder charges against a drunken driver who went the wrong way down an exit ramp after a Super Bowl party, the jury foreperson hot-footed it to the local public library and checked out a [...]

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The Virginia Judicial Council recommended yesterday the adoption of a rule on juror privacy that leaves the matter largely to the discretion of the trial judge rather than having jurors in criminal cases identified only by number as a matter of course. The original proposal, which would have jurors identified by numbers in all cases, [...]

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