The VLW Blog

The L.A. Times offers a cautionary tale this week in a piece about how jury duty is becoming more of a hardship for members of the venire.
In one civil trial, jurors who were already peeved at having to miss work became openly disdainful about the plaintiff’s claims. The juror hostility was so palpable the parties [...]

[Read more →]

The Advisory Committee on Rules of Court has backed off from its original proposal to have jurors in criminal court identified only by number as a matter of course.
The original draft had drawn criticism from newspapers, the Virginia Coalition for Open Government and even from Del. Bob Marshall, R-Prince William, who sponsored the legislation that [...]

[Read more →]

A jury room dispute is now public following a closely watched Shenandoah County murder trial.
Members of the jury recommended on Thursday that Jody Lynn Bradley serve nine years in prison for the second-degree murder of Brendon Manning Barker, a 16-year-old boy who was shot while visiting Bradley’s daughter.
Some jurors are now arguing that his sentence [...]

[Read more →]

The jury deadlocked in an Albemarle County trial involving a killing 21 years ago.
In 1988, Roger Lee Shifflett was robbed and shot to death at the convenience store he owned and operated, reports The Daily Progress. Less than a month after the shooting, defendant Alvin Lee Morris divorced his own wife, married Shifflett’s widow and helped [...]

[Read more →]

A Fairfax County jury has returned a $3.2 million verdict for a shopper at the IKEA housewares store in Woodbridge who suffered a crushed pelvis in 2006 when a stack of countertops fell on her.
Edward L. Weiner, the plaintiff’s lawyer, said his client incurred $75,000 in medical bills after two surgeries, $50,000 in lost wages [...]

[Read more →]

Even though the trial judge remarked that imposing jury costs on a nonsuiting plaintiff was “pretty standard here in this court,” the Supreme Court of Virginia finds any such jury fee unwarranted under Virginia law.
In Martin v. Duncan, the wrongful death plaintiff  didn’t like the way things were going at trial and took a nonsuit.  [...]

[Read more →]

The Supreme Court of Virginia today outlawed the use of the “unavoidable accident” jury instruction in personal injury trials.
Writing for a unanimous court in Hancock-Underwood v. Knight, Justice Donald W. Lemons said, “While in the past we have permitted under rare and specific circumstances an instruction on unavoidable accident, today we join the clear trend [...]

[Read more →]

In Virginia, the taxpayers pick up the tab for civil litigants who exercise their right to a jury trial.  One Virginia senator wants to make a small change in that practice.
Sen. Ralph Smith, R-Daleville, has introduced legislation that would stick the plaintiff with the bill for the jury if the plaintiff came away empty handed [...]

[Read more →]

That must be what a Christiansburg woman has been thinking for the past seven months.
Here’s a lady who gets a parking ticket at a middle school for parking in the bus lanes.  Obviously displeased about the ticket, she yells back at the cop, “Drop dead, fat—,” as she drives away.
If only she had left it [...]

[Read more →]

Arguing that Roanoke white supremacist William A. White belongs behind bars, a federal prosecutor today raised the suggestion that White posed a threat to President-elect Barack Obama.  In a Chicago courtroom across the street from the Obama presidential transition office, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Ferrera pointed to an article White had published on his Web [...]

[Read more →]