The VLW Blog

Police use of a GPS system to track a sex offender in an Arlington County abduction case has survived a rehearing en banc in the Virginia Court of Appeals. But the appellate court refused to endorse the investigative technique. Instead, it held that police already had good reason to tail David L. Foltz Jr. as [...]

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If you beget a child beyond the borders of the commonwealth, you may not be able to get child support through a Virginia court. A Virginia woman whose love affair with a filmmaker living in France left her with a 12-year-old daughter to support cannot sue the film maker for child support in Virginia, the [...]

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Court personnel are on the front lines of customer service every day. So it’s nice when someone notices these public servants can’t always respond to the guff they can get when dealing with the public. When he got a summons to appear for jury duty in Norfolk Circuit Court, James C. Henderson went to the [...]

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A man’s motives in sending dirty e-mails to his estranged wife may come in for a second look when the Virginia Court of Appeals rehears the case of Dennis Barson. Over a six-month period, Barson had sent “vulgar, offensive and sexually explicit” e-mails to his wife Amanda and to friends and family, accusing Amanda of [...]

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Another attempt at the “Ambien zombie” defense has come to naught at the Virginia Court of Appeals. As we noted last month, some sleep-inducing drugs such as Ambien apparently can cause users to take to the streets while still in a sleep-like state. That may have been what happened to Joshua Shortt, but the courts [...]

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Ellen Marie Rix thought she was helping out the driver of the car when she switched seats after a Virginia Beach policeman pulled over the vehicle. Bad move – and not just because the policeman saw the switch. The other occupant of the car, Veselina Stoilova, subsequently testified that she asked Rix to switch seats [...]

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Divorce courts deciding custody often look at travel time when they juggle visitation schedules. One Fairfax court got right down to the daily commute, deciding a child should change from a Virginia school to one in Annapolis in order to cut his windshield time. When William Atkins and Debra Piccirillo divorced in 2005, the parties [...]

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The Virginia Court of Appeals today rejects constitutional challenges to two convictions, holding in one case that a dying declaration is an exception to the Confrontation Clause and finding in the other an exception to the recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion ruling that the arrest of a driver generally does not authorize the warrantless search [...]

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A mother can enforce a child support order from 1966, the Virginia Court of Appeals said today, making the father liable for $73,629 in support for a 42-year-old child. In 1966, an Alexandria divorce court ordered the dad to pay $30 per week for the couple’s three children. His support obligation ended in June, 1982, [...]

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The Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed today the embezzlement convictions of former Louisa County priest Rodney Rodis. A jury recommended that Rodis serve a total of 200 years on 10 embezzlement counts stemming from the theft of more than $200,000 from two parishes that he served. The trial judge suspended all but 13 years of [...]

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