Category: Courts and law
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Sex, Lies and Virginia Law: The Susanna Gibson Case
Republished with permission from the Liberty Unyielding blog. “Susanna Gibson, a House candidate in Virginia, had sex with her husband in live videos posted online and asked viewers to pay them money in return,” notes USA Today. A recent video shows the Democratic candidate for Virginia’s House of Delegates doing sex acts. She allegedly also…
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Virginia Deserves a Parole Board that Puts Public Safety First
by Kerry Dougherty When Terry McAuliffe was governor he found a loyal Democrat lawyer to appoint to head Virginia’s parole board. That was Adrianne Bennett, a failed candidate for the House of Delegates in 2011 and undoubtedly the most controversial parole board chair in Virginia history. She was a success if you believe, as McAuliffe…
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Be Careful of What You Wish For
by Dick Hall-Sizemore For those on this blog who advocate the election of judges in Virginia, The Washington Post today has an article that should give you second thoughts. Courts cannot be isolated completely from partisanship, but it should be distressing for anyone, regardless of one’s partisan leanings, that a state supreme court, such as…
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The Sorry State of the ACLU of Virginia
by Hans Bader The communist activist Angela Davis advocated abolishing prisons in the U.S., while supporting the incarceration of political prisoners in totalitarian communist regimes overseas. The ACLU of Virginia has touted Angela Davis’s stances in the past, such as in an April 4, 2022 tweet quoting Davis. Now, the ACLU of Virginia has returned…
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Guns for Felons?
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Virginia law prohibits a convicted felon from possessing or transporting a firearm. Is that unconstitutional under the provisions of last year’s Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen (597 U.S. ___; 142 S. Ct. 2111)? Background Before trying to answer that question, it is helpful to…
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Richmond’s 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Needs Better Judgment
by James C. Sherlock Federal judges are supposed to call balls and strikes in relation to the Constitution and the law. President Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act into law on June 3. Sec 324 of that law, Expediting Completion Of The Mountain Valley Pipeline, blocked any court from hearing cases about permits for the…
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Understaffed Nursing Homes and the False Claims Act
by James C. Sherlock Nursing home operators, paid by government insurance programs on a per diem basis for caring for their patients, make higher profits if they understaff than otherwise. The less staff they have, the higher their operating margins. The federal government, with much experience in such situations, tries to offset those incentives with…
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Miyares Loses in Court
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Our Attorney General has taken his lumps in court recently. First was a jury acquittal in a high-profile criminal case he engineered. Later, the Virginia Supreme Court unanimously ruled against an agency that had been administering a provision of the Code based on guidance from the Attorney General. The first case was…
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Mr. Saddam Salim’s Strange Acceptance of Political Endorsements
by Emilio Jaksetic In the upcoming November 2023 election, the Democratic Party candidate for Virginia Senate District 37 is Saddam Azlan Salim. Salim won the Democratic nomination by defeating Chap Peterson in the June 20, 2023 primary. A profile of Mr. Salim is available on Ballotpedia. A hypertext link in the Ballotpedia profile goes to…
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Where Do Dems Stand on Civil Immunity for Law Enforcement Officers?
by James C. Sherlock Being a law enforcement officer is tough under the best of circumstances. Do you think that exposure to losing your house and car in a civil suit for something you did in a split second to protect the public and yourself and did not have reason to know was against the…
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Where Does Freedom of Speech End?
by Dick Hall-Sizemore I have a question. Under the recent Supreme Court case ruling that a wedding website designer could refuse to provide her services to a gay couple because to do so would require her to write something that she did not want to say, thereby violating her First Amendment right to free speech,…
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Equal Protection, Affirmative Action and Effecting Generational Change
by James C. Sherlock America is the most successful nation in the history of the world because of the freedoms and rights guaranteed by our Constitution. More than a hundred other nations have emulated the American Constitution. Without constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and rights, we would be chained to the whims of the state. Most immediately…
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Nursing Shortages Require Better Oversight of Virginia Nursing Homes – Part Two – State Action Required
by James C. Sherlock Patterns of understaffing, medical harm and abuse in nursing homes are traceable: in some cases to a business model of understaffing to increase profits. Federal fines are built into the business models of the bad actors. Some of the worst post double-digit annual operating margins; in some to other systemic chain-wide…
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Check Out Which New Virginia Laws Go Into Effect July 1st
by The Republican Standard staff The Virginia General Assembly passed several small bills due to the split between the Republican-led House of Delegates and the Democratic-controlled Virginia State Senate. Yet the areas where they did find co-operation could matter to many Virginians as we head into Fourth of July weekend. Enhanced Penalties for Fentanyl Manufacturing…
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Roanoke County Quietly Extends Contract For $109,000 Year Registrar But Questions Persist
by Scott Dreyer For many historical and cultural reasons, America has traditionally been what sociologists call a “high-trust” society. As reported in this report from the Pew Research Center, cultures with high trust (such as Canada and Sweden) usually have low crime and corruption while the reverse (such as South Africa and Peru) is also…