JUVENILE AND CIRCUIT COURTS – APPEAL PERIOD – CORRECTION OF ORDERS – RECEIVED AFTER APPEAL DEADLINE. Maybe anybody who has never received a juvenile court order until after the 10-days appeal period has run has never lived, or at least hasn’t practiced law very long, but the Court of Appeals recently got a chance to discuss this issue, in an opinion that for some readers may read like a good-news/bad-news joke. Yes, there is a statute that covers the set-aside of orders for failure to receive notice of the entry of a final order, and it’s the one that talks about setting aside default judgments for clerical mistakes and the independent actions that can be brought for relief from fraud and related matters. But the bad news for a hapless father seeking relief from a JDR court custody order that the mother had obtained is that that statute applies only to judgments of the circuit court. After all, it says so. The father immediately moved to reconsider for lack of jurisdiction, seeking a change of the entry date to a date late enough to allow him to appeal, but the juvenile court refused, and the circuit court, when resorted to, denied the motion on the grounds that §8.01-428(C) does not apply. Though one wonders whether anything could have been done using the statute granting the circuit court power to do anything here that juvenile court can do, but after all, the circuit court here would have had to want to do something under that statute. Eklund v. Eklund, unpublished, 25 VLW 1446 (5/17/11].
