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Monty Tayloe
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
The Rappahannock County Circuit Court was crowded with witnesses and jurors Friday as local attorney David L. Konick lost his appeal.
Konick was on trial for obscene phone harassment charges, which stemmed from a phone call he made to Combined District Court Clerk Patricia M. Davis last May. As Konick and Davis were the only witnesses to the actual phone call, both defense and prosecution pursued a “character” based strategy of calling numerous witnesses to testify on the reputations of the caller and callee.
“Only two people were on the call. It’s a “he said-she said’ situation,” said Konick’s attorney J. Casey Struckmann. The defense strategy was altered just before the trial started by Judge Frank A Hoss Jr. “Evidence has to be related to the relationship between Konick and Davis,” said Hoss. Konick was first convicted of the charge in the Rappahannock county General District Court last August, but appealed that conviction to the Circuit Court.
The jury of four women and three men came back with a guilty verdict for Konick’s second trial after about an hour of deliberation, sentencing him to pay a $2,000 fine. After briefly consulting with his client, Struckmann told Judge Hoss that “it is likely that the conviction will be appealed.”
Bad call
The charges originate in a phone call Konick made to Davis while she was at work at the Rappahannock County Courthouse in Washington on the morning of May 4. Both Konick and Davis testified that Konick called pretending jokingly to be interested in a job position as a deputy clerk. Davis and Konick have known each other professionally in the Rappahannock legal community for more than 20 years, and both have admitted that prior to this incident exchanges between them were often characterized by jokes and mutual “banter”.
According to Davis, after asking about the position Konick made an explicit suggestion to her over the phone. Davis testified that she then
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