The VLW Blog

Norfolk Circuit Judge Chuck Griffith lost his job this spring when the General Assembly declined to give him a second eight-year term on the bench.

But he didn’t stay out of work long. In fact, the day after his term expired, Griffith reported to the office of Virginia Beach Commonwealth’s Attorney Harvey Bryant. Griffith took a newly created position in that office - he is now cordinator of major violent crimes cases.

The Virginian-Pilot has the story.

A woman and her daughter, visiting Virginia Beach from the Midwest, claim they were attacked by bedbugs at the Rodeway Inn, a hotel on Atlantic Avenue.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that the pair have filed a lawsuit, seeking more than $400,000 for bites and other injuries and for damage to their property.

Virginia Beach spent $200,000 in 2002 to put together a facial recognition security system at the Oceanfront, but the system has essentially been scrapped, reports The Virginian-Pilot. It was designed to match facial images to a computer database, but it suffered from technical problems and has not been used in two years.

The Beach chief of police noted that the systems work very well in a closed environment such as a casino or an airport. But the facial-recognition technology just doesn’t cut it at an outdoor venue.

Virginia Beach was the second U.S. city to try the technology, following the lead of Tampa, Fla. But Tampa also encountered problems and abandoned its project in 2003.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

After all, Ernestine Combs really needed a liquor license for her lounge, Uroma.

And Virginia Beach really wanted to keep Virginia Beach’s notorious “Block,” the area near 17th Street and Pacific Avenue, as orderly as possible.

So the city agreed not to object to the liquor license so long as Combs agreed to certain restrictions: No do-rags; no sneakers, T-shirts or athletic wear after 9 p.m.; and certainly no hip hop or gangsta rap “that could incite violence.”

A lawyer in the office of City Attorney Les Lilley signed off on the deal, which was negotiated by public safety attorney Kathy Rountree.

It was such a good idea that the folks responsible didn’t perceive that those restrictions might be viewed as insensitive, if not racist.

As Kerry Dougherty points out in a column in The Virginian-Pilot, some of those folks are having second thoughts.

Lilley says he was outraged and offended when he learned of the restrictions. Rountree says she was so excited that Combs agreed to close her doors at 2 a.m. that she lost focus on some of the other restrictions.

Lilley says he plans to ask the AG’s office to remove the restrictions.

Jon D. Huddleston, a Leesburg lawyer who has long been active in the Virginia State Bar, has announced his candidacy for president-elect of the organization.

Huddleston has been on Bar Council since 2001 and became a member of its executive committee last year. He has been a member of the VSB’s budget and finance committee since 2003 and its leadership task force since 2004.

He was on the board of governors of the young lawyers conference from 1993 to 1996 served for seven years on the Conference of Local Bar Associations, where he was chairman in 1998.

Huddleston is a partner in the eight-lawyer firm of Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White and was president of the Loudoun County Bar Association in 2003-04. He has a general practice that includes family law, traffic and criminal defense, personal injury and civil litigation.

He graduated from the College of William and Marry in 1986 and from its law school four years later.

The filing deadline for the position is Oct. 1. The successful candidate will become president in June 2009. The current president-elect, Howard W. Martin Jr. of Norfolk, will succeed Karen A. Gould of Richmond as president later this month, and Manuel A. Capsalis of Arlington will become president-elect.

A lawyer might understand a distinction between “illegal conduct” by a judge and a lack of statutory authority for judicial action, but everybody at a Republican breakfast in Virginia Beach on Feb. 3 probably wasn’t a lawyer.

Or maybe it’s a distinction without a difference to Virginia Beach’s nine circuit judges.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that Bryant acknowledged in a news release that he mentioned to the gathering that he was keeping track of instances in which judges act without statutory authority.

But he insisted that he had not accused the judges of illegal conduct.

He said the judges have filed a complaint with the Virginia State Bar that the alleged “illegal conduct” comment violates legal ethics.

Bryant issued the press release after he learned that the newspaper intended to run a story about the controversy and said at the most recent breakfast that he has been praying for the judges since the allegations was made. “Maybe I should have started a long time ago,” he said, according to The Virginian-Pilot. He did not say in the press release what the actions without statutory authority might have been.