The VLW Blog

Divorce lawyers looking for a benchmark for monetary awards may want to check out a recent Court of Appeals case.

Lawyers know there is no rule requiring a 50-50 split of marital property. But arguments about who contributed what to a marriage often degenerate into “he said, she said” contests. Then something approaching an even split can seem like the most equitable outcome.

Then there are cases that skew the other way.

After Carey and Dean Roberts’ 24-year marriage ended, Accomack County Circuit Judge Glen Tyler awarded the wife 95 percent of the marital property. The Court of Appeals upheld that equitable distribution in an unpublished opinion released Dec. 27.

Tyler found the husband made only negative contributions to the marriage, especially during the last 10 years the parties lived together. The husband didn’t hold a job and didn’t help around the house. In fact, at times he endangered the financial stability of the family either by creating debt, depleting family resources or by creating situations that could have cost wife her job, according to the appellate panel opinion.

It was the wife who held things together.

Tyler said the case, Roberts v. Roberts, was “the most remarkable case” presented to him in “many, many years.”

We’ve reported stories in the past about road hazards caused by stuff spilled on the highway. Concrete. Fruit. A load of eggs on the Beltway in Northern Virginia.

Here’s a new one: Chicken fat. If that sounds pretty gross, it was.

A tanker was carting chicken fat, a processing byproduct, from a Perdue poultry plant in Accomack County yesterday morning, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch, when about 3,000 gallons of the goop spilled on Highway 13. Apparently the driver failed to secure a hatch and the stuff sloshed on the road. He realized the mistake 20 miles later when he stopped at a weigh-station.

Chicken fat is brown and oily and smells like rotten chicken that you left in the fridge and forgot to cook by its sell-by date. For a couple of weeks. Imagine 20 miles of that smell. At 6 in the morning, a roadway covered with same looks like it’s drenched with rain, but it is as slick as wintertime black ice.

At least four wrecks were caused by the fat on the road, including one four-car crash that sent several people to the hospital with minor injuries. The highway department moved quickly to get sand down on the fat.

The tanker’s driver was cited for failure to maintain his load.