The VLW Blog

A Manassas man may be re-tried after the Court of Appeals reversed convictions of capital murder and abduction, The News & Messenger reports.
Anthony Dale Crawford was convicted Feb. 9, 2007, of killing his estranged wife in 2004. In May 2007, he was sentenced to two life sentences plus 67 years for capital murder, abduction with [...]

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Same judge, different lawyer, still contempt.
The Virginia Court of Appeals today upheld a second contempt citation by former Norfolk Circuit Judge Charles D. Griffith Jr. for a lawyer who assumed that a continuance would be granted as a matter of course.
The unpublished opinion, Zedd v. Commonwealth, was hardly surprising in light of Singleton v. Commonwealth, [...]

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Judge Cleo E. Powell was sworn in formally this afternoon as the newest judge of the Virginia Court of Appeals. She had served previously as a general district and circuit judge in Chesterfield County.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine appointed her in August to fill the vacancy created by his elevation of Judge LeRoy F. Millette Jr. [...]

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Travis Stacey Whitehead was in the right rear passenger seat when a narcotics detection dog alerted on the driver’s door of a car in
Suffolk in April 2006.
Police searched the car and the other four occupants of the vehicle before they searched Whitehead and found heroin residue and paraphernalia in his pocket.
Whitehead contended that the alert [...]

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That’s what the Virginia Court of Appeals said this week to a Fairfax couple who divorced in 2006 but still managed to accumulate a 6,000-page, 19-volume joint appendix in their 2008 appeal.
Jeffrey and Lynette Fadness married in 1980 and reared three children to adulthood.
Jeffrey appealed last year, then appealed again, complaining that the Fairfax [...]

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We have yet another example of the importance of precision in appellate practice in Virginia, even if the lack of precision ultimately turned out not to be fatal.The issue stemmed from the detention of Matthew Tremaine Moore in February 2005 after a Henrico patrolman noticed a peeling inspection sticker on the windshield of Moore’s rental [...]

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A defense attorney has a trial date for a client charged with drunken driving. The prosecutor agrees to a continuance, and the lawyers endorse a proposed order.
The defense attorney advises his client that he does not have to appear in court on the date and doesn’t show up himself. That probably isn’t much of a [...]

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The Virginia Court of Appeals responded today to a Supreme Court of Virginia opinion in April that took the intermediate appellate court to task for dismissing cases under Rule 5A:20(e).
That provision requires that the opening brief include “[t]he principles of law, the argument, and the authorities relating to each question presented.” In several cases, the [...]

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Gov. Timothy M. Kaine named Court of Appeals Judge LeRoy F. Millette Jr. to the Supreme Court of Virginia and replaced him with Chesterfield Circuit Judge Cleo E. Powell on the intermediate appellate court.
Kaine also named McGuireWoods LLP partner James C. Dimitri to the State Corporation Commission. And he appointed two circuit judges in Fairfax [...]

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The Virginia Court of Appeals today issued a writ of actual innocence, the first petition to be granted since the law authorizing the procedure was enacted in 2004.
The action was expected because Attorney General Robert McDonnell acknowledged in his response to the petition that Darrell Andrew Copeland was improperly convicted of possessing a firearm after [...]

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