"Bigamy has been defined in Virginia as the 'state of a man who has two wives, or of a woman who has two husbands, living at the same time.'" While infrequently charged, likely due to the fact that it infreqeuntly occurs, bigamy is very clearly still a crime in the Commonwealth of Virginia. This fact was made abundantly clear in the case of Cole v. Commonwealth of Virginia, a published opinion issued by the Court of Appeals on August 2, 2011. In Cole, the defendant very clearly married another woman while still being married to the first. However, he attempted to argue, unsuccessfully, that because bigamous marriages are "void ab initio" in Virginia it was legally impossible for him to marry a second time. The Court, in an opinion authored by Judge D. Arthur Kelsey, quickly dispensed with this argument in upholding the Defendant's conviction, noting that the law in Virginia "condemns bigamy as both illegal and void."
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