Adventures With The Virginia Courts Case Information System
323 words.
Regarding the DWI charges against Mrs. Sayre, Republitarian cited: “Case # for first offense GV03000972-00. Case # for second offense GT063034-00.” I don’t live in the 24th, but I thought it might be fun to do a little fact-checking on this today. (I applaud Republitarian for giving voters the means to independently verify these claims.) I fired up the Virginia Courts Case Information system and started looking. Here’s what I found:
GV03000972-00 (screenshot) is a civil case filed in Rockbridge County/Lexington by the Commonwealth of Virginia against Mrs. Sayre in August 2003. The nature and result of the case is not shown.
“GT063034-00” isn’t a valid case number and returned no matches. I tried some other permutations without any success. I then tried searching for the name “Sayre” in SWAC-area counties and found:
GT06000444-00 (screenshot): A misdemeanor DWI filed in Staunton against Mrs. Sayre in January 2006. It looks like a fine was paid and her license was suspended for a year. I’m not familiar enough with legal lingo to tell whether there was any jail time served. The charge was “amended” (whatever that means) from a “DWI, 2ND” to a “DWI, 1ST.”
From this I’m satisfied that at least one DWI charge is factual and in the public record.
P.S. You might be wondering why I would care about Mr. Sayre’s family since I don’t live in the 24th District. It’s because I believe fact-checking is a crucial part of the modern political process, especially with the apparent ascendancy of completely unaccountable political blogs. Somebody needs to protect the public from overzealous activists. :)
P.P.S. The New Dominion did similar fact-checking, but they must have better “online court records” than I do, because I saw no indication that the 2003 case was DWI-related. (They also called John Maxfield an “editor.”)
P.P.P.S. I should get some kind of medal for spending so much time in the Virginia Courts Case Information system. It’s icky.
Sorry, new comments are disabled on older posts. This helps reduce spam. Active commenting almost always occurs within a day or two of new posts.