"House Clerk G. Paul Nardo said the move will represent a cultural change in Virginia’s politics."
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The commonwealth is making a significant move this year to livestream and archive committee hearings of the General Assembly, which open government advocates have been pushing for years. The videos will begin Wednesday on the opening day of the General Assembly session. Last year, a majority of lawmakers signed a letter to Senate Clerk Susan Clarke Schaar and House Clerk G. Paul Nardo asking for broadcasting of committee hearings in the Pocahontas Building, where lawmakers are working for four years while a new General Assembly building is constructed. Nardo said the move will represent a cultural change in Virginia’s politics, also coming at a time when lawmakers — including many new faces — are moving into the temporary building.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
A feud between neighbors, spiked with an aged and weighty symbol of racism, has made its way this week from an unpaved side road off a dead-end street in Rocky Mount to the Virginia Supreme Court in Richmond. On Wednesday, the court’s seven justices will hear arguments in the case of Jack Eugene Turner, who is attempting to appeal a 2015 felony conviction he got in Franklin County after he hung a life-sized dummy from a tree branch in his yard on Lindsey Lane. That display came in June 2015, during a period when Turner, now 54, was at odds with his next-door neighbors, who are black. Prosecutors successfully argued in circuit court that he had violated a fairly new state law, established in 2009, which prohibits presenting a noose as a means of intimidation. The only Virginian ever convicted of this offense, Turner was sentenced to six months in jail and he served that time. But from the beginning, defense attorney Holland Perdue has argued that the hanging figure was protected as free speech under the First Amendment, and that the display existed on Turner’s own private property and not “on a highway or other public place” as the statute prohibits.
The Roanoke Times
The emails, generated on form letters, came like an avalanche, fast and furious enough that those who got them wondered whether the senders were real. But Paul Milde, then-chair of the Stafford Board of Supervisors who fielded more than 400 in seven days in December, knew many of them. They were people he’d represented for a dozen years. Curiously, they opposed a medical clinic a government contractor hoped to build on Stafford Hospital’s east campus—a project supervisors could find little bad about. Supervisors soon learned what they were up against: A Facebook page and a hastily launched website that claimed to represent Stafford Citizens for Smart Growth, but whose origin couldn’t be traced.
The Free Lance-Star
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"One of the cornerstones of democracy in our state has a name guaranteed to drop your eyelids to half-mast."