The VLW Blog

The Virginia Supreme Court’s remand of a grandparent custody case has raised questions about who gets to award attorney’s fees, according to four judges of the Court of Appeals.
In its Sept. 12 opinion in Lynchburg Division of Social Services v. Cook, the high court ordered the Court of Appeals to send the custody case back […]

[Read more →]

If you change the locks when your spouse moves out, be prepared to pay some rent.
In McIlwain v. McIlwain, the Court of Appeals today upheld an award to a wife of one-half the fair market rental value of a couple’s home for the six-year period after she moved out.
The Hanover County couple owned the jointly […]

[Read more →]

Virginia Court of Appeals Judge D. Arthur Kelsey couldn’t help but imply that Robert Thurman Pilson might not be the best candidate for a home electronic monitoring program.
Not only was Pilson sentenced to the mandatory minimum one-year term for driving as an habitual offender, his criminal record includes convictions for escape, eluding police, resisting arrest, […]

[Read more →]

The General Assembly appears poised to fill at least three judicial vacancies, but legislators are still scrambling to find a Supreme Court justice, an SCC member and judges in Hampton and Norfolk.
Likely to be appointed are Fredericksburg Commonwealth’s Attorney Charles S. Sharp to replace Circuit Judge John W. Scott Jr., who died in April; Stafford […]

[Read more →]

“This is not a game of ‘Gotcha,’ ” insisted Senior Virginia Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth B. Lacy. “We want to deal with substantive issues.”
But she acknowledged that the two state appellate courts are refusing to address more and more of those issues because of procedural defaults. She said she didn’t know whether the blame lay […]

[Read more →]

A narrow majority of the Supreme Court of Virginia failed today to find a “meaningful distinction” in recently decided cases involving a folded dollar bill and hand-rolled cigarettes.
Those cases were among seven in which defendants prevailed.
The bills in Snell v. Commonwealth, decided by published order today, and Grandison v. Commonwealth, decided last June, both contained […]

[Read more →]

To say that Jimmy Roger Lane was caught with the goods would be an understatement.
In one pants pocket he had 62 tablets of oxycodone , 17 tablets of hydrocodone and two plastic bags with a total of $4,128 in cash. In the other, he had $181 in cash and 28 tablets of Endocet, a […]

[Read more →]

Judge Nelson T. Overton, who served on the Court of Appeals from 1995 to 1999, died at his home yesterday. He was 79.
The judge was a circuit judge in Hampton before he became the first judge from the Peninsula to serve on the intermediate court.
The Daily Press has details.

[Read more →]

Was it a grand gesture on a moonlit night? That first flush of new parenthood?
We don’t really get the details in Miller v. Miller, decided yesterday by the Virginia Court of Appeals. But we do know now that just throwing a prenuptial agreement into a fire did not revoke the prenup, whatever the couple may […]

[Read more →]

A papa tried a gender reversal on that truism when he asked a divorce judge to switch custody from the mother to the dad, who wanted to relocate to Florida.
The divorce judge said evidence showed the father’s response to a “strained relationship” with his daughter was to set ever stricter limits on the girl’s behavior […]

[Read more →]