Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 7, 1992 TAG: 9201070090
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE VERDICT: LESS SMOKE, MORE HAZE
Tired of waltzing around the feelings of cigarette smokers, the Roanoke County supervisors picked up the tempo last month and ordered an in-your-face fandango.No more five-year plans, lassoes of gently tightening rules easing county-owned buildings toward a smoke-free, if distant, future. No more rooms set aside for smokers.
The supervisors in December dispensed with the niceties: They just banned smoking altogether in all county buildings. The edict took effect last week, sending smokers into exterior exile.
The policy applies to all county buildings except the courthouse. The county courthouse is in Salem, exposing an uncertainty about jurisdiction that has been lingering for about three centuries.
Do county laws apply inside the courthouse? Salem laws?
To avoid having to answer that question, the decision about smoking in the courthouse has been left to the circuit court judges who preside there.
This is a good opportunity for judges to set an example for the attorneys who bedevil them day in and day out. Attorneys run for office, are elected to the legislature, and write laws that are so remarkably ambiguous that they generate reams of court tussles. The attorneys are unceremoniously dumped from office, and return to the courthouse to argue the intentions of the very laws they wrote.
Judges are left to interpret the hopelessly vague codes after gaggles of attorneys babble Latin at them all day in court.
The smoking policy, then, is a prime opportunity for judges to craft a simple and unambiguous policy as a lesson to lawyers: Rules need not be complicated to be effective.
If you believe that is what the judges have done, you are hopelessly naive and juicy prey for con men of every ilk.
The courthouse smoking policy sprawls over five magnificent pages. It encompasses clauses and sub-clauses, exceptions and directives. It allows judges to smoke in their chambers, gives judges the discretion to set apart smoking jurists from non-smoking jurists, and every midlevel court bureaucrat to rule like a tsar over smoking in his or her domain.
Witnesses can smoke in their witness rooms; bailiffs can't smoke in their bailiff stands; commonwealth's attorneys can smoke in their offices but not in the courtroom.
Smoking is prohibited in the Fred L. Hoback Sr. Law Library, though in the attorneys' lounge area it is permitted "if all parties in the lounge are agreeable."
Ha. Bet that's never happened.
"We have tried," says Roanoke County Circuit Judge G.O. Clemens, "to take a reasonable approach. We tried to follow the rules at Roanoke city's courthouse."
Indeed, they have - even down to permission to smoke "at one designated table on the westerly end of the employees' snack lounge."
Judges have written no-smoking policies for the courthouses that perfectly mimic the laws they daylong must untangle - complex, ensnarled and impossible.
Smokers need only remember these simple rules of thumb: No smoking inside county buildings. In the county courthouse, read the policy, and get a lawyer.