Many law enforcement agencies use traffic stops to uncover other potential driver violations. For example, an officer who stops you for running a stop sign might have more serious charges in mind, like a DUI.

The most common driver response when a police officer attempts to pull them over is to pull over to the side of the road or into a parking lot if there’s heavy traffic present.

However, in limited cases, adrenaline and fear might take over, spurring the decision to run from the police. 

If you are caught running from police, what charge can you expect? Fleeing from an attempted traffic stop is known as eluding police in VA.

If you are charged with eluding police in VA, you should contact a qualified criminal defense attorney as soon as possible. Contact Attorney Andrew Flusche today to set up your initial consultation.

What Is a Running from the Police Charge?

After an eluding police charge in VA, many clients ask us, Is evading the police a felony? In Virginia, the law outlines two forms of eluding police, misdemeanor eluding and felony eluding. The penalty for not stopping for police rises as the dangerousness of the conduct rises.

No matter what level of running from the cops charges you receive, the court will suspend your license for not less than 30 days and not more than one year. If your speed is determined to have exceeded the speed limit by 20 mph or more, the minimum suspension period rises to 90 days.

Misdemeanor Eluding

Code of Virginia Section 46.2-817(A) states that an individual who, having received a visible or audible signal from any law enforcement officer to stop their motor vehicle, drives their motor vehicle in a willful and wanton disregard of such signal, or who attempts to escape or elude the law enforcement officer, is guilty of the Class 2 misdemeanor of eluding police.

A Class 2 misdemeanor in Virginia carries the potential of up to six months in jail and a fine of not more than $1,000.

Felony Eluding

Code of Virginia Section 46.2-817(B) states that an individual who, having received a visible or audible signal from any law enforcement officer to stop their motor vehicle, drives their motor vehicle in a willful and wanton disregard of such signal so as to interfere with or endanger the operation of the law enforcement vehicle or another person is guilty of the Class 6 felony of eluding police.

A Class 6 felony in Virginia carries the potential of between one and five years in prison, or in the court or jury’s discretion, jail for no more than 12 months. Additionally, a Class 6 felony carries the potential of a fine not to exceed $2,500.

Essentially, the level of eluding police charges depends on the risk of harm to law enforcement and other bystanders created by your attempt to flee the traffic stop. 

Eluding Resulting in Death

If a law enforcement officer is killed as a direct and proximate cause of pursuit, the party who committed felony eluding is guilty of a Class 4 felony. A Class 4 felony in Virginia carries the potential of 2-10 years in prison. Additionally, a Class 6 felony carries the potential of a fine not to exceed $100,000.

Defenses to Eluding Police in VA

Virginia’s eluding police statute outlines a potential affirmative defense to the charge.

If the defendant can demonstrate that they reasonably believed they were being pursued by someone other than law enforcement, the affirmative defense applies. For example, if the car attempting to stop you lacked any police markings or emergency lights, this affirmative defense could apply to your case.

Other potential defenses to eluding charges include:

• Someone else was driving the vehicle;
• You didn’t receive a visible or audible signal to stop your vehicle; or
• You pulled over as soon as it was safe to do so.

An experienced criminal defense lawyer can help determine if a legal defense applies in your case.

Facing a Running from the Police Charge in Virginia? Contact an Experienced Criminal Defense Attorney Today

I have represented many clients facing charges of eluding police in Virginia. I was admitted to the Virginia bar in 2007, and shortly after that, I began representing clients charged with traffic infractions.

I realized quickly that this was a niche that excited me. I find great satisfaction in helping everyday people who stumble into the criminal justice system based on a traffic infraction get the justice they deserve.

I know how scary this can be, and I know what it takes to secure a good outcome for my clients. Additionally, I have extensive professional relationships with local law enforcement and prosecutors.

I believe these relationships are a critical asset when negotiating for the best possible plea agreement. I tackle my cases with a result-oriented approach looking to have your case dismissed or your charges reduced. I handle all of my cases personally, giving each client the one-on-one attention their case deserves.

Contact my office today to discuss your case. 

The post What Happens if I Don’t Stop for Law Enforcement in Virginia? appeared first on Andrew Flusche.

For a while I've been thinking about how best to share the stuff I'm reading or watching or listening, without just posting them to Facebook. Substack is the obvious answer, but screw that. I don't need another platform that will eventually disappoint me. So we'll do it right here on the blog with a monthly feature I've named Inputs.

I spent 5 seconds on that name. You can probably tell.

Reading

I apparently finished six books in January. Hiding from Omicron had at least one pleasant side effect. They are all cataloged on the books page, so I won't go into detail here. Lassoing the Sun: A Year in America's National Parks by Mark Woods soothed my camping neglected soul in January. Likewise Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams by Robert Peterson gave me a midwinter baseball fix. Due to the owners being billionaire assholes I'm probably going to be looking for a substitute Red Sox fix this Spring as the owners seem willing to forego hundreds of millions in revenue this year in the hopes of getting billions more later. But that is a subject for a different post.

Online, I found a few things that were worth bookmarking.

The Battle to Save Waikiki Beach is a long but very interesting look at how all the various competing interests make it hard to get stuff done, even when everybody accepts the danger of climate change and the need to do something.

100 hard rock and metal albums you need in your life delivers exactly what it advertises. And it's written by a long time internet friend.

An old Virginia plantation, a new owner and a family legacy unveiled is a great story about a family buying the plantation in Virginia where their enslaved ancestors once toiled.

Drivin' N Cryin' got some love in This underdog Southern band is getting a well-deserved victory lap

I also enjoyed this story of non-partisan bird walks led by the Audubon Society for congressional staffers.

Watching

Hitting the treadmill almost every morning means I've upped my screen time quite a bit. Treadmill viewing has included a re-watch of The Dirt, some Olympic Curling, and I'm almost done with Lupin, which is a fabulous crime mystery on Netflix.

Michelle and I blasted through two seasons of For All Mankind, the Ronald D Moore series on Apple TV about an alternate history where the Russians got to the moon first. It's the drama and tension of Battlestar Galactica brought to the Space Race.

We also watched the final season of The Expanse, which wrapped up things nicely while leaving one big unresolved thing that could power a sequel if Bezos is so inclined.

Speaking of final seasons, we also got through the first half of the final season of Ozark, a show filled with completely unlikable characters, except maybe for Ruth. She is a heroin dealer though, so likable maybe only goes so far. The last half of the season is due in June I think.

We also watched Summer of Soul, the Questlove produced flick about the music and culture festival in Harlem the summer of 1969 that got overshadowed by Woodstock and completely forgotten, until the footage was rediscovered in 2019. It's up for a well deserved Oscar and you should watch it.

Listening

The whole Spotify dust-up has me trying to listen to my music more and random streaming less. However, random Internet travels did unearth some fabulous new to me music this month.

Lawrence is a wildly talented brother - sister team from Brooklyn channeling the best of early 70s soul (think Stevie Wonder, think The Jackson Five, etc.) layed with modern pop sensibilities. Not my usual jam, I know, but holy crap are these kids good!

Also, Ghost Hounds is a blues rock / roots rock band from Pittsburgh that I have had on repeat play for the last week.

And that's it. We only left the house for necessary errands in January as we tried to do our part to limit the spread of Omicron. It was probably a futile effort as nobody else seems to give a fuck. However the three folks living in my house have managed to not catch any version of COVID-19, so there is that.

A while back when I quit Amazon Prime (note to self - quit Amazon Prime again) I mentioned how the big problem with Prime was that it eliminated so much friction from the process of making a “buy” decision. Spending is one place where friction is good.

Do you know where else we need more friction? Human communication, particularly the online variety. The ease of clicking reply and saying something rude or stupid is going to cause a war soon, if it hasn’t already. My average Tweet only gets seen by about 100 people, but I’m much more likely to get a rude reply than I am here on my blog, which I think also gets about 100 readers to an average post. I took all analytics off the site a few years ago, so I’m not really sure, but that average held over most of the last decade, so no reason to think it’s changed dramatically. I never get rude emails about a blog post. (Note - not an invitation!). Clicking the email link at the bottom of the post really isn’t that much work, but nobody does it. But if I express the same thought on Twitter, I’m much more likely to get a rude reply from roughly the same number of viewers.

Interestingly, Twitter is experimenting with a feature that triggers a pop-up box suggesting your reply appears to be rude or angry, and gives you a chance to reconsider before posting. They report about 30% of people do edit or cancel the post. So apparently 30% of Twitter users are sheeple that can be led around by the company.

That was a joke.

I also noted in my previous blog post that a little friction in the music listening experience might make it better. If you pick an album versus letting an algorithm choose for you, the music is likely to be more meaningful and more memorable. If we accept that the above thesis is true, it presents a problem. The internet seems to exist to remove friction from every process it can touch, but if our happiness relative to those experiences suffers due to the lack of friction, we are literally making ourselves unhappier and unhappier the more time we spend online. Well, except for the time spent reading this blog.

I was an early adopter of the commercial Internet, and it’s paid my bills since 1996. But more and more I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve made a terrible mistake. Not the concept of the Internet, a worldwide platform anybody can publish to is a fine idea, but our implementation, particular the monetization of it, has ruined the ideals we all had when we were doing this stuff in 1996.

I don’t have any real solutions here, except maybe some of you should dust off your blogs and start posting regularly again.

Inspiration for this post

This post composed while listening to Natchez Trace and Restoration by Kevin Bowe & The Okemah Prophets, streaming straight from my SSD drive.

A while back when I quit Amazon Prime (note to self - quit Amazon Prime again) I mentioned how the big problem with Prime was that it eliminated so much friction from the process of making a “buy” decision. Spending is one place where friction is good.

Do you know where else we need more friction? Human communication, particularly the online variety. The ease of clicking reply and saying something rude or stupid is going to cause a war soon, if it hasn’t already. My average Tweet only gets seen by about 100 people, but I’m much more likely to get a rude reply than I am here on my blog, which I think also gets about 100 readers to an average post. I took all analytics off the site a few years ago, so I’m not really sure, but that average held over most of the last decade, so no reason to think it’s changed dramatically. I never get rude emails about a blog post. (Note - not an invitation!). Clicking the email link at the bottom of the post really isn’t that much work, but nobody does it. But if I express the same thought on Twitter, I’m much more likely to get a rude reply from roughly the same number of viewers.

Interestingly, Twitter is experimenting with a feature that triggers a pop-up box suggesting your reply appears to be rude or angry, and gives you a chance to reconsider before posting. They report about 30% of people do edit or cancel the post. So apparently 30% of Twitter users are sheeple that can be led around by the company.

That was a joke.

I also noted in my previous blog post that a little friction in the music listening experience might make it better. If you pick an album versus letting an algorithm choose for you, the music is likely to be more meaningful and more memorable. If we accept that the above thesis is true, it presents a problem. The internet seems to exist to remove friction from every process it can touch, but if our happiness relative to those experiences suffers due to the lack of friction, we are literally making ourselves unhappier and unhappier the more time we spend online. Well, except for the time spent reading this blog.

I was an early adopter of the commercial Internet, and it’s paid my bills since 1996. But more and more I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve made a terrible mistake. Not the concept of the Internet, a worldwide platform anybody can publish to is a fine idea, but our implementation, particular the monetization of it, has ruined the ideals we all had when we were doing this stuff in 1996.

I don’t have any real solutions here, except maybe some of you should dust off your blogs and start posting regularly again.

Inspiration for this post

This post composed while listening to Natchez Trace and Restoration by Kevin Bowe & The Okemah Prophets, streaming straight from my SSD drive.

Hang on a second, gotta cancel my Spotify account before continuing this post. .
.
.
.
.

Huh. I don’t have a Spotify account. Not paid anyway. I never bothered to migrate away from Pandora. I do have a free account, so I can listen to the occasional song or playlist that somebody posts on Twitter or Facebook. For most of this century, I really didn’t use streaming music services. I’ve had a Pandora account since it was a start-up service in the early 2000s, but I mostly used it for occasional free listening at work. However, I've been WFH full-time since 2015. For about the last year, we have had a Pandora family account, which I use to mostly play music I already own. I need to stop doing that. Streaming services are useful for previewing new music before deciding to buy, and for sharing on social media, since sharing a song from my Dropbox would violate all kinds of rules and laws.

I have my MP3 directory on my computer. I don’t have time to enjoy the 500 odd albums I’ve chosen to buy over the years. Adding 70 million more choices on a streaming service doesn’t really help solve that problem.

Also, tech stocks have gotten hammered this entire month. Spotify, along with just about every other tech stock, has lost tens of billions combined market value. Neil Young did not blow up Spotify’s stock.

Here is the thing. You are never going to listen to even .01% of the music available on Spotify, or any of the other streaming services. Their value prop is portability and music discovery. Portability is not a big deal anymore. If you don’t want to install Plex, back up your MP3 directory to Dropbox. There are free apps that will let you stream straight from Dropbox. Again, not a user but from what I’ve read online this week music discovery on Spotify has been broken for years, as the algorithm recommends what gets Spotify paid the most, not what you might want to hear next.

I have a crazy idea, so hear me out. What if we all started talking about music again? What if we shared the cool stuff we are listening to on Twitter or Facebook or our blogs or wherever. Human curation > algorithms, every time and forever. Also, what if we bought the music we wanted to listen to? It’s better for the artists, and probably better for the environment too. Won’t you think of the songwriters, and the polar bears?

Also, support live music. Most indie bands are basically t-shirt sales operations anyway. Go to the show, buy the CD, buy a t-shirt. You’ll have more fun and the artist will make more money. It’s a win-win.

One more thing. Abundance causes us to under value anything. It's a simple economic principle. So having 70 million songs available at any time causes you to value any specific tune at roughly zero. Contrast that with a carefully curated record collection, even if it is all in MP3 form. Those albums have value. They have meaning, because they are yours. Also, you probably know the music better when you choose to play it, versus passively consuming whatever Spotify throws at you.

You don’t need Spotify for podcasts. In fact, Spotify locking up podcasts on their platform violates the spirit of openness that podcasts were created under. Podcasts use RSS (remember Google Reader?) It’s an open platform by design, an open platform usable by anybody with no fee or gatekeepers involved. So fuck Spotify just on principle, even if it is an asswaffle like Rogan they are locking up behind a proprietary platform.

Keep using Spotify or don’t, I really don’t care. I doubt it’s going to make any difference in the long run anyway. I’ll be here listening to my MP3s using an open source music player, like I have been for the last 20 years.

This post composed while listening to the album Perfectly Good Guitar by John Hiatt, using the open source Audacious music player to play locally hosted MP3 files.

Hang on a second, gotta cancel my Spotify account before continuing this post. .
.
.
.
.

Huh. I don’t have a Spotify account. Not paid anyway. I never bothered to migrate away from Pandora. I do have a free account, so I can listen to the occasional song or playlist that somebody posts on Twitter or Facebook. For most of this century, I really didn’t use streaming music services. I’ve had a Pandora account since it was a start-up service in the early 2000s, but I mostly used it for occasional free listening at work. However, I've been WFH full-time since 2015. For about the last year, we have had a Pandora family account, which I use to mostly play music I already own. I need to stop doing that. Streaming services are useful for previewing new music before deciding to buy, and for sharing on social media, since sharing a song from my Dropbox would violate all kinds of rules and laws.

I have my MP3 directory on my computer. I don’t have time to enjoy the 500 odd albums I’ve chosen to buy over the years. Adding 70 million more choices on a streaming service doesn’t really help solve that problem.

Also, tech stocks have gotten hammered this entire month. Spotify, along with just about every other tech stock, has lost tens of billions combined market value. Neil Young did not blow up Spotify’s stock.

Here is the thing. You are never going to listen to even .01% of the music available on Spotify, or any of the other streaming services. Their value prop is portability and music discovery. Portability is not a big deal anymore. If you don’t want to install Plex, back up your MP3 directory to Dropbox. There are free apps that will let you stream straight from Dropbox. Again, not a user but from what I’ve read online this week music discovery on Spotify has been broken for years, as the algorithm recommends what gets Spotify paid the most, not what you might want to hear next.

I have a crazy idea, so hear me out. What if we all started talking about music again? What if we shared the cool stuff we are listening to on Twitter or Facebook or our blogs or wherever. Human curation > algorithms, every time and forever. Also, what if we bought the music we wanted to listen to? It’s better for the artists, and probably better for the environment too. Won’t you think of the songwriters, and the polar bears?

Also, support live music. Most indie bands are basically t-shirt sales operations anyway. Go to the show, buy the CD, buy a t-shirt. You’ll have more fun and the artist will make more money. It’s a win-win.

One more thing. Abundance causes us to under value anything. It's a simple economic principle. So having 70 million songs available at any time causes you to value any specific tune at roughly zero. Contrast that with a carefully curated record collection, even if it is all in MP3 form. Those albums have value. They have meaning, because they are yours. Also, you probably know the music better when you choose to play it, versus passively consuming whatever Spotify throws at you.

You don’t need Spotify for podcasts. In fact, Spotify locking up podcasts on their platform violates the spirit of openness that podcasts were created under. Podcasts use RSS (remember Google Reader?) It’s an open platform by design, an open platform usable by anybody with no fee or gatekeepers involved. So fuck Spotify just on principle, even if it is an asswaffle like Rogan they are locking up behind a proprietary platform.

Keep using Spotify or don’t, I really don’t care. I doubt it’s going to make any difference in the long run anyway. I’ll be here listening to my MP3s using an open source music player, like I have been for the last 20 years.

This post composed while listening to the album Perfectly Good Guitar by John Hiatt, using the open source Audacious music player to play locally hosted MP3 files.

From early May last year through the end of the year, I don’t think we were ever home 3 weekends in a row. There was a period in the fall that between a work trip to Denver, camping, a road trip to Roanoke, and a visit with Michelle’s dad in Florida, I went 6 straight weekends not being home. I pretty much haven’t left the house since Christmas, except for necessary errands like grocery shopping and weekend walks in the park, and I’m very much feeling the walls close in on me. Michelle says I’m pacing in the house like a caged animal. Breck and I have tickets tomorrow for Bruce Dickinson’s Spoken Word show in Raleigh. However, they aren’t checking vaccine status for that show, and the Venn diagram for metal heads and anti-vaxxers has way too much overlap for me to feel comfortable spending an evening with a couple of thousand Iron Maiden fans. So I’m writing those tickets off and staying home.

All of which is to say I’m feeling the wanderlust hard right now. I very much want to be anywhere but home. But winter travel in Virginia is kind of the worst of all worlds. It’s too cold most days for any extended outdoors activities, and there is no snow pack to power traditional wintertime activities that might be fun. Mostly it’s just cold and dry or cold and muddy.

It looks like Omicron peaked here last week, as the curves on the CDC graphs all have a steep negative slope over the last few days. Hopefully that continues right back to a community spread percentage well below 10%, so we can start to feel safe about concerts and other large gatherings again.

The cutback in social media is going well. I’ve already noticed my ability to concentrate for 5 minutes to read longer form articles has improved. What I did with Facebook is I created a couple of custom friends lists and using a FireFox plug-in I can open the profile page of everybody in the list with one click. So once a week I open a bunch of tabs with your profile pages and I can quickly catch up in less than 30 minutes. Doing it this way has made it obvious that most of you are basically not using Facebook. Or, put another way, my Facebook feed was being dominated by just a handful of you folks! Anyway, Facebook use is down to 30 minutes a week.

In other news, I got a very late arriving Christmas gift in the mail yesterday.

And finally, on my 30-minute tour of Facebook yesterday, I stumbled into the YT video below. I know I’m an old and thus don’t have my finger on the pulse of popular music, if I ever did, given my normal tastes. However, these kids are amazing. They sound like a mix of the Jackson 5, some Stevie Wonder, and other early 70s funk/soul influences with a layer of modern pop sensibilities. I’ve had their 3 albums on constantly since yesterday afternoon.

From early May last year through the end of the year, I don’t think we were ever home 3 weekends in a row. There was a period in the fall that between a work trip to Denver, camping, a road trip to Roanoke, and a visit with Michelle’s dad in Florida, I went 6 straight weekends not being home. I pretty much haven’t left the house since Christmas, except for necessary errands like grocery shopping and weekend walks in the park, and I’m very much feeling the walls close in on me. Michelle says I’m pacing in the house like a caged animal. Breck and I have tickets tomorrow for Bruce Dickinson’s Spoken Word show in Raleigh. However, they aren’t checking vaccine status for that show, and the Venn diagram for metal heads and anti-vaxxers has way too much overlap for me to feel comfortable spending an evening with a couple of thousand Iron Maiden fans. So I’m writing those tickets off and staying home.

All of which is to say I’m feeling the wanderlust hard right now. I very much want to be anywhere but home. But winter travel in Virginia is kind of the worst of all worlds. It’s too cold most days for any extended outdoors activities, and there is no snow pack to power traditional wintertime activities that might be fun. Mostly it’s just cold and dry or cold and muddy.

It looks like Omicron peaked here last week, as the curves on the CDC graphs all have a steep negative slope over the last few days. Hopefully that continues right back to a community spread percentage well below 10%, so we can start to feel safe about concerts and other large gatherings again.

The cutback in social media is going well. I’ve already noticed my ability to concentrate for 5 minutes to read longer form articles has improved. What I did with Facebook is I created a couple of custom friends lists and using a FireFox plug-in I can open the profile page of everybody in the list with one click. So once a week I open a bunch of tabs with your profile pages and I can quickly catch up in less than 30 minutes. Doing it this way has made it obvious that most of you are basically not using Facebook. Or, put another way, my Facebook feed was being dominated by just a handful of you folks! Anyway, Facebook use is down to 30 minutes a week.

In other news, I got a very late arriving Christmas gift in the mail yesterday.

And finally, on my 30-minute tour of Facebook yesterday, I stumbled into the YT video below. I know I’m an old and thus don’t have my finger on the pulse of popular music, if I ever did, given my normal tastes. However, these kids are amazing. They sound like a mix of the Jackson 5, some Stevie Wonder, and other early 70s funk/soul influences with a layer of modern pop sensibilities. I’ve had their 3 albums on constantly since yesterday afternoon.