Understanding Your Domestic Relations Rights in Virginia, 2016-2017

The Metropolitan Richmond Women’s Bar Association has published this booklet to help you understand the general legal circumstances that you may face in resolving domestic relations problems under Virginia law. Each person faces unique circumstances that may not be specifically addressed in a broad overview. This booklet is not intended to provide specific advice to you or to address your specific situation. You should use this document only as an introduction to understanding your legal rights. This booklet is based on laws in effect in Virginia on July 1, 2016. Because laws are always subject to change, you should consult your local court or a lawyer for possible changes

30 Tips for Excellence in Juvenile Defense

This article for the Virginia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers newsletter provides advice on representing juvenile clients

Capital Sentencing for Children in Virginia in the Wake of Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana

Recent United States Supreme Court decisions have declared it unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile to mandatory life in prison without an opportunity for parole. Virginia, a state that abolished parole in 1995, has yet to recognize the federally mandated prohibition against disproportionate punishment imposed on juveniles, particularly in cases where the mandatory minimum sentence is life without parole. This article proposes the General Assembly should amend current laws that reflect the unconstitutionality of these statutes as applied to juveniles

Making Juvenile Justice More Humane and Effective

Long commutes, high costs and too much time away from family are among the most common frustration for workers in Virginia. But while those annoyances may be tolerable when it comes to our daily commutes, they have become an unfortunate feature of Virginia’s youth justice system, which confines hundreds of youth in large institutions far from their homes. When young people have regular visits with their family and other members of the community, they have a much higher chance of being rehabilitated and successfully returning to those communities. Currently, many incarcerated youth in Virginia are held far from their families, unable to stay connected due to high travel costs and restrictive visiting hours. This model, which inhibits regular and therapeutic contact, is untenable, unfair, and counterproductive to our goal of helping young people eventually rejoin their communities and become productive citizens

Five Devastating Collateral Consequences of Juvenile Delinquency Adjudications You Should Know Before You Represent a Child

The original purpose of the juvenile court was to create a forum, separate from the adult courts, in which children could be given the opportunity for rehabilitation and treatment. Society placed an emphasis on correcting misbehavior and minimizing disruptions in the transition to adulthood for young people and wanted to spare them the stigma of being branded as “criminals.” In 1967, the Court established in In re Gault that juveniles, even though they were in a different system, were still entitled to the basic safeguards that an adult would be granted in the courtroom. For most of the existence of the juvenile court in Virginia, the belief that children are amenable to reform prevailed. Unfortunately, the late 1980s and 1990s ushered in a new attitude about how children should be treated in the criminal justice system. Based on a now disproven theory that there would be a wave of juvenile “superpredators” that would wreak havoc on our communities, public policy began to deemphasize youth privacy, treatment, and rehabilitation in favor of laws designed to heighten public accountability. In reality, the predicted youth crime wave never materialized and between 1999 and 2008, juvenile arrest rates for violent crimes decreased by 8.6 percent and total juvenile arrest rates have fallen by 15.7 percent in the past decade. Regardless, Congress and the Virginia General Assembly enacted numerous laws ceating serious collateral consequences attendant to delinquency adjudications. In Padilla v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court recently addressed the duty of counsel to advise clients about collateral consequences. In light of this case, the lifelong impact of many collateral consequences, and the inherent vulnerability of children, it is imperative that to provide efective assistance of counsel, attorneys inform their clients of all the potential collateral consequences of a juvenile adjudication or conviction. Collateral consequences greatly impact the lives of individuals with criminal records, as well as, in many instances, the lives of their families. These consequences, both individually and collectively, constrict the social, economic, and political access of the two million juveniles arrested nationwide each year, impeding the individual’s ability to reintegrate successfully into the community upon release. The collection of consequences that can attach to a single conviction is exceedingly difficult to grasp, as they comprise a mixture of federal and state statutory law, regulatory law, and local policies

The United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset

Academic researchers, government agencies, industry groups, and individuals have produced forecasts at an unprecedented scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. To leverage these forecasts, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with an academic research lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub. Launched in April 2020, the Forecast Hub is a dataset with point and probabilistic forecasts of incident cases, incident hospitalizations, incident deaths, and cumulative deaths due to COVID-19 at county, state, and national, levels in the United States. Included forecasts represent a variety of modeling approaches, data sources, and assumptions regarding the spread of COVID-19. The goal of this dataset is to establish a standardized and comparable set of short-term forecasts from modeling teams. These data can be used to develop ensemble models, communicate forecasts to the public, create visualizations, compare models, and inform policies regarding COVID-19 mitigation. These open-source data are available via download from GitHub, through an online API, and through R packages

Bi-allelic Loss-of-Function CACNA1B Mutations in Progressive Epilepsy-Dyskinesia.

The occurrence of non-epileptic hyperkinetic movements in the context of developmental epileptic encephalopathies is an increasingly recognized phenomenon. Identification of causative mutations provides an important insight into common pathogenic mechanisms that cause both seizures and abnormal motor control. We report bi-allelic loss-of-function CACNA1B variants in six children from three unrelated families whose affected members present with a complex and progressive neurological syndrome. All affected individuals presented with epileptic encephalopathy, severe neurodevelopmental delay (often with regression), and a hyperkinetic movement disorder. Additional neurological features included postnatal microcephaly and hypotonia. Five children died in childhood or adolescence (mean age of death: 9 years), mainly as a result of secondary respiratory complications. CACNA1B encodes the pore-forming subunit of the pre-synaptic neuronal voltage-gated calcium channel Cav2.2/N-type, crucial for SNARE-mediated neurotransmission, particularly in the early postnatal period. Bi-allelic loss-of-function variants in CACNA1B are predicted to cause disruption of Ca2+ influx, leading to impaired synaptic neurotransmission. The resultant effect on neuronal function is likely to be important in the development of involuntary movements and epilepsy. Overall, our findings provide further evidence for the key role of Cav2.2 in normal human neurodevelopment.MAK is funded by an NIHR Research Professorship and receives funding from the Wellcome Trust, Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital Charity, and Rosetrees Trust. E.M. received funding from the Rosetrees Trust (CD-A53) and Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity. K.G. received funding from Temple Street Foundation. A.M. is funded by Great Ormond Street Hospital, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), and Biomedical Research Centre. F.L.R. and D.G. are funded by Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre. K.C. and A.S.J. are funded by NIHR Bioresource for Rare Diseases. The DDD Study presents independent research commissioned by the Health Innovation Challenge Fund (grant number HICF-1009-003), a parallel funding partnership between the Wellcome Trust and the Department of Health, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (grant number WT098051). We acknowledge support from the UK Department of Health via the NIHR comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre award to Guy's and St. Thomas' National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust in partnership with King's College London. This research was also supported by the NIHR Great Ormond Street Hospital Biomedical Research Centre. J.H.C. is in receipt of an NIHR Senior Investigator Award. The research team acknowledges the support of the NIHR through the Comprehensive Clinical Research Network. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, Department of Health, or Wellcome Trust. E.R.M. acknowledges support from NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, an NIHR Senior Investigator Award, and the University of Cambridge has received salary support in respect of E.R.M. from the NHS in the East of England through the Clinical Academic Reserve. I.E.S. is supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (Program Grant and Practitioner Fellowship)

Author Correction: CHD3 helicase domain mutations cause a neurodevelopmental syndrome with macrocephaly and impaired speech and language

The original version of this Article contained an error in the spelling of the author Laurence Faivre, which was incorrectly given as Laurence Faive. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article