A firearm charge under 18 U.S.C. §924(c)(1)(A) carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years if the firearm is carried, seven years if it is brandished, and 10 years if it is fired. Those sentences often exceed the penalty for the underlying felony itself. “In many cases, the [firearm] charge is the tail wagging the dog,” said John P. Elwood, a partner in the Washington office of Vinson & Elkins and an instructor at the University of Virginia School of Law Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, which is representing the defendant in the case before the court.
These new Maryland cases show how effectively synthetic-drug laws can be enforced to punish accused Maryland criminals and to try to take their ill-gotten gains. Sprouse’s lawyer, Fred Heblich, a veteran federal public defender in Virginia and a lecturer at the University of Virginia School of Law, says criminal cases involving analogues are hard for defendants to beat.
On his first night as an attending physician, moonlighting in the ER of a rural southern hospital, Travis Stork, MD, got his first postgraduate lesson in life and death. "A father frantically ran into the ER carrying a young boy who was unresponsive and barely breathing," recalls Dr. Stork, the Emmy-nominated cohost of the award-winning talk show The Doctors. When the child's breathing became more faint and his lips started turning blue, Dr. Stork knew he had to act quickly.
Socioeconomic trends in college admission and enrollment is the topic of a forum at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute on Thursday.
David Sullivan often calls on his background as an athlete to lead the Saber Management LLC team in the funeral and cemetery business.
How certain payments are described in the final deal very well may have been a factor in getting JPMorgan to agree to the $13 billion figure, some tax lawyers and other experts said. “There might be a reason for the government to negotiate an agreement which assures the deductibility of [certain] payments by JPMorgan Chase,” said George Yin, a law professor at the University of Virginia and former chief of staff at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “In that case, [JPMorgan] might be willing to agree to a larger gross settlement amount, which might play well for t...
Dr. Brandi Nicholson, a radiology physician at CRH and the University of Virginia, said women should get their first mammogram at age 40 when the risk for breast cancer increases. “If we can find the cancer on an early screening, it will decrease mortality by 30 percent,” she said.
Researchers at the University of Virginia are taking on a big project classifying hundreds of thousands of species - and they need the public's help with the project. UVA has a new crowdsourcing project called "Notes from Nature." People from around the world can access online descriptions of bugs, plants, or birds and help transcribe them.
A group of physicists at the University of Virginia — investigating reports of animal behavior before earthquakes — discovered that rocks, when crushed under high pressure that mimicked the force of an earthquake, emitted high levels of ozone gas. "Even the smallest rock fracture produced ozone," researcher Catherine Dukes told LiveScience in an earlier interview. "The question is, can we detect it in the environment?" And can animals detect a sudden rise in atmospheric ozone?
New members of boards of visitors were advised Tuesday that they work “in a crowded sandbox” that requires them to be supportive of their president and respectful of faculty. While the board may make the final call, “there are others who play in there with you,” Richard D. Legon, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, said. Legon was among the speakers at an annual orientation for members of governing boards that was made mandatory this year as a result of the 2012 leadership crisis at the University of Virginia.
(By Patrick Tolan, director of Youth-Nex at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia) There is a troubling bias that most adults hold about adolescents, particularly in how we overlook the importance of the transition from elementary to middle school. It is a bias that goes beyond insensitivity and creates serious consequences – impeding education, stymying potential, and decreasing productivity and civic engagement with the world around them. It also misdirects policy and allocation of limited resources.
Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Rothenberg Report all said Griffin’s departure moves the seat into their narrow list of competitive races for 2014. “This takes a race that people weren’t paying much attention to and puts it into the top tier of competitive races,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, which has moved the 2nd District seat from “Safe Republican” to “Leans Republican.”
In western culture, the afterlife is often depicted as a place where angels rest on clouds and harps play soothing music. Here in Virginia, some people hear that music even before death. A program called Music by the Bedside is making for a peaceful passing. It’s a sunny afternoon in an old Victorian house near downtown Charlottesville, and Kate Tamarkin, conductor of the Charlottesville and University Symphony Orchestra – is using her spare time to play the harp at Hospice of the Piedmont.
A cascade of glitches in a major online college application program has frustrated prospective students across the country and prompted several universities to push back their fall deadlines, exposing vulnerabilities in the nation’s college admissions system. More than 515 colleges and universities, including the entire Ivy League and public flagships such as the University of Virginia, use the Common Application to help choose their incoming classes.
“We’re on the right track,” she said. That was also the conclusion of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Virginia who examined how the system evaluates teachers. Their study, published as a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the IMPACT system put in place in 2009, with its controversial combination of big rewards and serious accountability, has resulted in low-performing teachers leaving the system. Equally significant was the finding that those who stayed – teachers with both strong and weak scores initially &n...
Literacy experts emphasize the importance of natural conversations with children, asking questions while reading books, and helping children identify words during playtime. Even these simple principles may be hard to implement, some educators say, because preschool instructors are often paid far less than public schoolteachers and receive scant training. In one study, Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, found that in observations of 700 preschool classrooms across 11 states, teachers in less than 15 percent of the classes demonstrated “effe...
Researchers from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, the University of Colorado and the University of Virginia analyzed 201 previous studies on whether financial education led people to make better financial decisions down the line. They found that financial education did have a positive effect, but one so small it’s barely noticeable.
As a sports reporter for the Gainesville Sun and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, John Hollis got his share of feedback from readers, especially when he covered pro games or college championships. But nothing quite prepared the Fredericksburg native for the wave of responses—more than 1,000 calls and letters in some instances – when he wrote about professional wrestling as a metro reporter for the Journal-Constitution.
Students at the University of Virginia are showing some sixth graders what it's like to be a college student. In this week's Stephanie's Heroes, CBS19's Stephanie Satchell is featuring the volunteers in the Phi Sigma Pi Honor Fraternity for their work with UVa's Day in the Life Program.
David Evans believes drastic change would probably be the best way to solve problems with the federal government’s health insurance website. “Probably the right solution would be to scrap what has been done so far and start from scratch,” said Evans, a professor of computer science at the University of Virginia. “But it’s difficult to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of work. … It’s hard for the federal government to operate like a startup company.”