How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Virginia reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Court of Appeals of Virginia / Joined 1998 / Served to 2000

Donald W. Lemons

Judge, Court of Appeals of Virginia

Donald W. Lemons was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia, who joined the court in 1998. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1998–2000 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1998	Court of Appeals of Virginia	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Lemons authored 27 published opinions for the court (1998–2000), plus 6 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Adams v. Commonwealth (100 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 14 of these were attributed to Lemons by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
2000	Adams v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	534 S.E.2d 347	100
1999	Richardson v. Richardson	516 S.E.2d 726	100
1999	McLean v. Commonwealth	516 S.E.2d 717	43
1999	Peeples v. Commonwealth· Concurrence†	519 S.E.2d 382	37
1998	Commonwealth v. Rice	504 S.E.2d 877	34
1999	Upchurch v. Commonwealth	521 S.E.2d 290	30
1999	Clay v. Commonwealth	516 S.E.2d 684	30
2000	Debroux v. Commonwealth	528 S.E.2d 151	29
2000	Rinaldi v. Dumsick	528 S.E.2d 134	25
1999	McDaniel v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	518 S.E.2d 851	23
1999	Moss v. Commonwealth	516 S.E.2d 246	22
1999	Brown v. Commonwealth	510 S.E.2d 751	22
1998	Roberts v. Commonwealth	504 S.E.2d 890	22
1998	Bynum v. Commonwealth	506 S.E.2d 30	20
1999	Bowman v. Commonwealth	516 S.E.2d 705	16

Showing the 15 most-cited of 35 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Virginia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was Donald W. Lemons on?: Donald W. Lemons was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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2 years on the Court of Appeals of Virginia. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).