A “legend.” A “visionary.” “One of the most consequential judges in Virginia history,” one whose opinion ultimately led to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against executing juveniles. Those are some of the terms used to describe former Virginia Supreme Court Justice Lawrence Koontz of Salem, who spent a remarkable 57 years wearing judicial robes at various levels of the state judiciary.
His standing as a legal titan was not always evident to those in the Roanoke Valley, where for many years he drove a green Volkswagen. It was not until Koontz finally ascended to the state’s highest court that he was persuaded to part with the green Bug as not being in keeping with his stature. “And so, he did give it up,” recalled Monica Monday, his former law clerk and now chair of the executive board of the Roanoke-based Gentry Locke law firm, “but I think it was with some reluctance.”
Koontz died at his home in Salem on Saturday after a long illness. He was 85.
Koontz served more than 15 years on the state’s highest court but was a judge at some level for most of his life. He was first appointed to the bench at the remarkably young age of 27. Along the way he helped set up an entirely new level of the judiciary, the Virginia Court of Appeals, where he served as chief judge for eight years.
The case Koontz was most proud of was when one of his opinions was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled in 2002 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. That opinion factored into a later case, in 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it’s unconstitutional to execute people for crimes committed before they turned 18.
“I have just always thought that as a society, we actually demean ourselves if we execute children,” Koontz once told The Roanoke Times.
“Lawrence Koontz was an outstanding jurist who served as a member of Virginia’s judiciary for over fifty years,” said Virginia Supreme Court Chief Justice Bernard Goodwyn in a text message. “He was a steadfast champion for fairness and justice. We are all indebted to him for his extraordinary service to the citizens of the Commonwealth.”
Koontz was born in Roanoke, the son of an electrical engineer and an art teacher. He originally went to Virginia Tech to study biology at a time when all male students were members of the Corps of Cadets.
“I wasn’t too big on the rigors of [the] military,” Koontz said in an interview with the state law librarian in 2013. However, he was elected a defense attorney for the honor court and became interested in the law as a profession. He graduated from law school at the University of Richmond in 1965 and returned to Roanoke, joining a law firm that included future Gov. Linwood Holton and future Rep. Caldwell Butler.
After two years, he joined the commonwealth’s attorney’s office. “I wanted to try more cases than I was trying, so he persuaded me that if I came to [the commonwealth’s attorney’s] office I would try cases almost every day, which is literally what we did,” Koontz said in the interview with the law librarian. “Because I had made up my mind at that time I wanted to be a trial lawyer, so I went there to get the trial experience.”
His time there did not last long. He was quickly offered an appointment as a juvenile and domestic relations judge. At first, he was reluctant to accept the post. “Judges had really come under strain that they couldn’t handle, so I said well I don’t want that to happen to me,” he said in the law librarian interview. “And one of the lawyers that I admired so much said, ‘Well if you want to be a trial lawyer you’ll get back into private practice. It’s a whole lot better to be a former judge of anything than an assistant commonwealth attorney.’ So I said, well, I will do it for two years, and that was my plan. Once I got into it I really thought the court could do a lot of good for a lot of people and I just sort of got caught up in that, and being as young as I was it didn’t have any immediate toll on me, so I just thoroughly enjoyed it.”
He wore judicial robes for the rest of his career.
Koontz said he found cases involving the termination of parental rights the most difficult of all. He said he was also confounded by cases where children were suffering from psychological problems and he had no expert advice to rely on. “I mean I had to sort of decide based on what they were saying: Does this child have a problem or not?” He was at a meeting in Northern Virginia when he learned that some courts in that part of the state had a court psychologist. “I remember asking the judge, ‘What in the world is that?’ and he said, ‘You mean you don’t have one?’ and I said, ‘No, as a matter of fact, I don’t, but I can tell you when I get back I’m going to start down that road to getting one. The point of all that is, the juvenile courts in those days were poorly staffed with people with expertise. Today that’s not necessarily the case, but there was a whole lot of shooting in the dark back in those days.”
He also lobbied to move the juvenile court out of a former detention facility. “It was heated by a cold stoker furnace, and if you wore a white shirt in there from time to time you’d get home and your cuffs would be all dingy in the wintertime when it was sort of sooty,” he said in the law librarian interview. “It was a rat trap. It was disgusting. So what I did is I had pictures, took pictures, and I went to the Roanoke Bar Association luncheon as a speaker and I just said, ‘Now here’s what the children and families of our community get when they come to court,’ and so then they quickly started a movement and we were able to move to a very nice facility down the street.”
In 1976, Koontz was named a circuit court judge. “To be frank with you,” he told the law librarian, “it allowed me to get out of a very, very trying and sad situation. It wasn’t always sad. I thought if we helped children and their families from time to time that was great, but it was just a continual flow of sad situations in people’s families. When you went on the circuit court it was not the case. It was sort of fun to watch two corporations fight each other and that kind of thing. So it was a change in the atmosphere for me, which I sort of thrived on. I loved it.”
At the time, any cases from circuit court that were appealed went directly to the Virginia Supreme Court. That led to backlogs, so in the mid-’80s, Virginia created the mid-level Court of Appeals. By then, Koontz was an obvious pick for this new court.
The first chief judge of that court was Ballard Baker of Richmond. Three months after the new court gaveled into operation, Baker died. Fellow judges turned to Koontz to lead them. Much of the initial organization of the appeals system fell to Koontz, including such minutiae as where the clerk’s office would be located in Richmond and how opinions would be published.
In his interview with the Supreme Court’s law librarian, Koontz said he and fellow appeals court judges were mindful that the appeals court was not quite an intermediate system as it seemed to outsiders. “The way the law was written, with the exception of criminal cases, the law was intended that in civil matters, administrative agencies and domestic relations, that the court of appeals would have the last say in those cases, unless and until the Supreme Court decided it was such an important matter that they would hear it. So we realized that the Supreme Court wasn’t going to hear anything like as many cases as we were hearing so we had to be very careful and very clear about what we did.” Johanna Fitzpatrick, who later served as chief judge of the appeals court, once said that Koontz was “a visionary who developed procedures that have allowed the Court of Appeals to flourish.”
Two years into his appellate career, Koontz was so well-regarded that he was in the running for a position on the Virginia Supreme Court. He lost out to Henry Whiting of Winchester but from then on was always mentioned as a likely state Supreme Court justice someday. That opportunity came in 1995 — ironically, when Whiting retired.
Koontz was regarded as a thoughtful judge who tried to be respectful of all who came before him. He was not one to set rhetorical traps in oral arguments. Virginia’s Supreme Court is regarded as far less partisan than its national counterpart. A decade ago, when Koontz was being given an award, Monday introduced him this way: “Justice Koontz’s decision-making defies such classification. His decisional process is decidedly non-partisan and non-doctrinal. He has at times been called the Court’s liberal or sometimes a moderate, depending on whom he is serving with on the Court. But the truth is, you will be hard-pressed to find that the outcome of cases he decides are determined by rigid philosophies or partisan doctrines.”
His most famous case was one in which he was in the minority. In 1996, an airman at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton was abducted and murdered. Two men were charged. One pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. The other, 18-year-old Daryl Atkins, was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to die. Testimony showed that Atkins was intellectually disabled; the legal question was whether it was constitutional to execute someone with an intellectual disability. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled yes by a 5-2 vote. One of those dissents came from Koontz, and was later cited by the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled 6-3 to overturn the Virginia decision. The ruling later factored into the Court’s ruling that minors can’t be executed.
Other decisions that Koontz was proud of involved those that struck down fines against striking coal miners and a ruling that pregnant workers can’t be fired, according to a 2010 interview with The Roanoke Times when he neared retirement.
Monday, his former clerk who now heads Gentry Locke, says Koontz left another legacy that’s less known but has wider implications: He encouraged the Supreme Court to write longer opinions. “Before Justice Koontz came to the Supreme Court, it appeared that the Court’s objective in writing opinions was probably more to achieve consensus in every word that was in the opinion, rather than to inform the bar,” she said in a 2015 speech. “Indeed, you will see that the Court’s opinions in those days were quite short.” Koontz thought the court should explain its reasoning in more depth to provide guidance to judges and lawyers across the state. “This has been one of Justice Koontz’s lasting contributions to the bar,” she said.
After retirement, Koontz continued as a senior justice, meaning he served on panels that helped decide which cases the court would hear or would sit on the bench if a justice had a conflict. He continued in that role through December 2024, according to Goodwyn.
As new of Koontz’ death spread Sunday, tributes came in.
Koontz was succeeded on the bench by Elizabeth McClanahan, now chief executive officer of the Virginia Tech Foundation. “Justice Koontz lived Virginia Tech’s motto, Ut Prosim, ‘That I May Serve,’ she said in a statement. “From his service to the legal profession, at every level of the judicial system, and to all Virginians, he set the example. His deep commitment as a colleague, professional, public servant and Virginian always shone brightly through his daily walk.”
“Justice Koontz was one of the finest jurists to serve the Commonwealth of Virginia,” said U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem. “He was always well-reasoned and a very kind man.”
Koontz is one of the few judges in Virginia history to serve at every level of Virginia’s judicial system, Monday said. “Justice Koontz left his mark on each Court on which he has served,” she said. “His service as a judge has literally had a transformative influence on Virginia’s judiciary. He is one of the most consequential judges in Virginia history.”