§ 8.01-654.When and where petition filed; what petition to contain.

Section 8.01-654 opens Virginia’s civil habeas corpus process. A person held without lawful authority — or someone acting for that person — can ask the Supreme Court of Virginia or a circuit court to examine the detention and order relief, backed by affidavits or other evidence showing the confinement lacks legal justification.

The section runs two different clocks. A habeas petition that does not attack a criminal conviction or sentence must be filed within one year of when the claim arose. A petition attacking a conviction or sentence gets more room: two years from the trial court’s final judgment, or one year after the direct appeal ends — or the time to file one runs out — whichever date lands later.

Jurisdiction narrows once the case involves criminal process. A petition may generally be filed with the Supreme Court or any circuit court, but only the circuit court that entered the judgment or order being challenged — or, for a district court judgment, the circuit court for the city or county where that district court sits — has authority to issue the writ, subject to § 17.1-310. Hearings on a granted petition, though, may be held at any circuit court within that same judicial circuit, as the presiding judge designates.

The petition itself must lay out every fact the petitioner already knows and list every earlier habeas petition and how each one turned out; a court will not grant relief based on facts the petitioner knew about but left out of an earlier petition, though a first petition raising only a denied right to appeal is spared that bar. Petitioners may challenge a conviction even when its sentence is suspended or stacked behind another sentence, courts may rule on the existing record when the facts allow it, findings of fact and conclusions of law must go into the record, and a claim of ineffective counsel waives the attorney-client privilege to the extent needed for a full and fair hearing on that ground.