Taxpayers may fund sheriff’s appeal

Taxpayers may have to foot the bill for Madison County Sheriff Erik Weaver’s appeal of a lower court ruling that he willfully violated Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act. The appeal had been set to go to trial, but a judge postponed it April 28 to first decide if the county must pay the sheriff’s attorney fees – to the tune of $250 per hour.

Specially appointed Judge F. Ward Harkrader Jr., a retired 16th Judicial Circuit Court judge who is presiding over the appeal, set 10 a.m. May 20 as the time for a hearing on the matter. The judge scheduled the hearing after County Attorney V. R. Shackelford III said the board of supervisors needed more time to decide how to respond.

“The county position on this reimbursement issue is that we have to be very careful on this,” Shackelford told the judge in Madison County Circuit Court April 28. He said the notice that the sheriff would be seeking county payment of his legal fees wasn’t received until April 25.

A motion Shackelford filed in the case April 28 said the board of supervisors needed written documentation that insurance wouldn’t cover the sheriff’s legal fees, something it hadn’t received. The county attorney’s motion also asked that if the county is required to pay the sheriff’s legal fees, the rate not be $250 per hour, but instead only be $90 per hour, since that’s what the commonwealth pays court-appointed attorneys in criminal cases.

Speaking at the April 28 hearing, Harrisonburg attorney Mark Obenshain, representing the sheriff, said the county should be required to pay, and said that Virginia code provides for sheriffs to have counsel appointed through the county for civil action arising from their official duties.

The plaintiff in the appeal, Brightwood resident Leigh Purdum, a former Madison County Sheriff’s Office public information officer, was represented at the April 28 hearing by David Lacey, an associate of her Richmond attorney, Craig Merritt.

The sheriff lost a General District Court case Dec. 18, 2007 that was filed by Purdum. He was ordered to personally pay a $250 fine and $53 in the plaintiff’s court fees.

Purdum, who now works part-time as a national law enforcement trainer on missing children issues, has said in previous interviews that she brought the suit against Weaver, her former boss, after he refused to identify the people he had appointed to a newly formed citizens advisory board. (The names have since been released.) Purdum also sought other information about the board, including its meeting dates, the criteria for choosing members, topics of discussion, goals and objectives and copies of previous minutes.

Weaver signed paperwork seeking the appeal three days after the December ruling by Judge Robert H. Downer, who was specially appointed from Albemarle County. The sheriff, who began his second term in January, has said in previous interviews that Purdum’s freedom of information requests, which came during a bitter sheriff’s election race, were actually personal attacks from someone he described as a “former disgruntled employee.”
(Purdum worked part-time for the sheriff’s office from January 2003 to April 2004, when she quit. Her husband, John Purdum, who worked as a deputy for Weaver, quit at the same time. “We found the sheriff’s operational standards unacceptable and in conflict with our ethics,” she explained in a letter that she submitted to The Eagle last year.)

(MG News Service Editor Rob Humphreys contributed to this story.)