by Laurence Hammack | Jan 30, 2022 | Courts/legal issues
On an April afternoon in 2017, Roanoke police officer Kimber Hughes was driving through the Lansdowne Park public housing complex when something caught her eye. A man, known by authorities as a suspected member of a street gang, was standing outside, surrounded by a...
by Laurence Hammack | Jan 30, 2022 | Courts/legal issues
In March 1974, Roger Trenton Davis was sentenced to 40 years in prison for 9 ounces of marijuana, an unusually harsh punishment that would make him nationally known as the “marijuana martyr.” Today, possession of small amounts of marijuana is legal in Virginia. Davis...
by Laurence Hammack | Jun 7, 2017 | Courts/legal issues
LEXINGTON — When social services workers finally removed a 3-year-old girl from her home of squalor and sexual abuse, she was wearing just a diaper, covered in dirt, her hair a matted mess. Nearly 4 at the time, she could speak only two words. One was the name of her...
by Laurence Hammack | Sep 12, 2010 | Courts/legal issues
CHATHAM — The life story of Teresa Lewis — one of “greed, lust, lies, all woven into murder-for-hire,” as told by the presiding judge — is nearing its predetermined end. At 9 p.m. Sept. 23, Lewis is scheduled to be executed for the...
by Laurence Hammack | Nov 3, 2009 | Courts/legal issues
The plot was bizarre, carefully planned and amateurishly executed: To make money in America, three young men from refugee families set out to find a wealthy woman, abduct her from her home and hold her for ransom. It all unraveled as soon as Audrey Levicki answered...
by Laurence Hammack | Jan 24, 2004 | Courts/legal issues
GALAX — Death loomed early for Logan Bowman, who weighed just 3 pounds, 15 ounces at birth. The premature infant’s father, Wayne Bowman, remembers holding his son in the palm of his hand and dressing him in clothes from a Cabbage Patch doll. “I...