The VLW Blog

Roanoke neo-Nazi activist William A. White apparently has been allowed extra time to try to hire a lawyer to defend him in a criminal contempt of court action.

A hearing set for Friday was postponed indefinitely after Roanoke lawyer Harry Brown filed a motion indicating that he was hired for civil matters only and is not prepared to defend White in the contempt matter.

In an accompanying affidavit, White offered some explanation for his actions that offended the court. He explained that he did not mean to send a copy of a profane and insulting e-mail to a judge’s law clerk. White said that he hit “reply all” on his e-mail program and did not know that one of the recipients was a court official. White stated that he meant to send the “flame” message only to attorney Anthony Troy and to a computer expert retained in the case.

White’s affidavit makes no mention of the principal basis for his contempt charge. White is accused of deleting more than 50,000 files from his computer after a subpoena was issued for his computer records.

According to court records, the U.S. Attorney’s office, appointed by the court to prosecute the contempt case against White, filed an ex parte sealed motion earlier this month which was granted by the court. We don’t know the effect of that ruling because the order granting the motion also is sealed.

By Peter Vieth

Former Petersburg Sheriff George Epps says that he was vindicated by a 2007 Supreme Court of Virginia decision that overturned his contempt conviction and he wants the city government to pay his legal fees. As reported by The Progress-Index, Epps made his request to the City Council, but received no answer.

Epps was convicted of contempt after a dispute with Circuit Judge Pamela S. Baskervill over courthouse security. His conviction was overturned when both the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court held that the judge should not have been allowed to testify.

Lost in the flap about a white supremacist facing federal contempt charges was the substance of the opinion that brought the charges to the surface.

Now available on the Western District Web site, Magistrate Judge Michael F. Urbanski’s opinion explains why — even though the defendant filed for bankruptcy protection — his contempt-of-court proceedings will go forward. Finding that William A. White’s apparent deletion of computer files in the face of a subpoena gives rise to a criminal, not civil, contempt proceeding, Urbanski wrote, “ ‘[T]he automatic stay was not intended by Congress to be used as a sword,’ and White cannot be allowed to use his bankruptcy filing as such.”

By Peter Vieth

Updating an April 30 blog entry, the Virginia Court of Appeals today granted rehearing en banc in Scialdone v. Commonwealth.

In its April 29 split panel decision, the appellate court reversed summary contempt, including jail terms, for two Virginia Beach lawyers and their law clerk. The lawyers, Claude Scialdone and Barry Taylor, were defending their client Frankie Dulyea on criminal charges stemming from online conversations in 2005 with an undercover cop pretending to be a pubescent girl. Virginia Beach Circuit Judge Patricia West ordered the lawyers to jail for offering into evidence an altered document purporting to show Internet chat-room rules at the time of Dulyea’s chats.

By Deborah Elkins

Defense attorney Jonathan K. Katz testified that he didn’t mean to ignore a trial judge’s admonition against calling witnesses “liars.” He was just so tired and stressed at the end of a 3 1/2-hour closing argument after eight days of testimony in a federal drug trial that he simply forgot the judge’s reprimand.

U.S. District Judge James P. Jones didn’t buy it.

Jones noted that his Western District colleague, Norman K. Moon, had told during the trial Katz not to use the term again to disparage witnesses after Katz had done so at least 30 times.

Katz refrained until the end of his argument, when he compared himself to Toto in The Wizard of Oz. He had exposed the falsehoods of the government’s witnesses just as the dog had pulled aside the curtain to show the true nature of the wizard, he said. He then yelled loudly and dramatically, “No good liars.”

Moon directed Katz, who is licensed in Virginia and practices out of Silver Spring, Md., to show why he shouldn’t be found in contempt. Jones presided over the show cause hearing after Moon recused himself.

The use of the closing phrase followed a careful and thoughtful analogy to the movie in a normal tone of voice and—notwithstanding Katz’s protestations to the contrary—was “a calculated theatrical stunt on his part,” Jones concluded in In re: Jonathan L. Katz. He ordered Katz to pay a $2,500 fine.