Chapter 25

After George Huguely V appeared via closed circuit television on May 4 for his arraignment, he was entitled to a speedy preliminary hearing. Apparently, he didn’t want one.

By law, the preliminary hearing—basically a baby version of the trial, meant for prosecutors to lay out just enough of their case to convince the judge that there is sufficient probable cause for the case to move forward—is supposed to be set soon after arraignment. Very often, however, suspects agree to postpone the date to give their lawyers enough time to collect and digest the evidence and prepare themselves for a defense. After the preliminary hearing, the judge decides whether the case should be forwarded to a grand jury, which then determines whether the defendant should face trial. With a case like the one against Huguely, there was no reason for defense lawyers to rush.

Huguely had admitted a fight with Yeardley, and his lawyer had stopped short of denying any culpability, instead calling it a tragic accident. If Lawrence was preparing to fight for a lesser charge, as legal onlookers expected, he faced the difficult task of convincing a judge that the prosecution didn’t have enough evidence to justify the first-degree murder charge. At the preliminary hearing stage, the judge doesn’t need to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. Rather, she must be swayed only enough to believe there is probable cause that a crime was committed. And that standard is far lower. Most states define probable cause as a “reasonable belief” the person committed the crime. Thus, the standard from preliminary hearing to trial shifts from “he might have done it” to “it’s unreasonable to think anyone else did.”

Huguely’s defense would be significantly helped if his lawyers were able to nix the first-degree murder charge before it ever reached a jury. And that’s typically why a defendant in a high-profile murder case might waive his right to a speedy preliminary hearing—to give his lawyers as much time as possible to gather evidence before both sides begin presenting their cases in court. The defense’s job, while not easy, was simple: undermine the prosecution’s case at every turn. If Chapman planned to argue that Huguely had murder on his mind, Lawrence needed to be ready to prove that his client had just meant to sit down for a chat.

Predictably, Huguely waived his right to speediness, and his preliminary hearing was scheduled for Thursday, June 10.

Less predictable was his lawyer’s decision to not request bond. In many cases, it’s perfunctory, even if it’s unusual that a judge would grant someone charged with first-degree murder the freedom to roam the streets while murder charges loomed. Many lawyers at least request that their clients be allowed to go home under house arrest, monitored by Global Positioning Satellite technology to track their whereabouts. Lawrence skipped the request.

Some speculated that in May, so soon after the slaying, the vitriol was too intense. Perhaps Lawrence would try to secure Huguely’s release after his scheduled June preliminary hearing.

John Zwerling, for one, didn’t question Lawrence’s decisions. He knew his colleague as a fine attorney with a stellar reputation.

“He has developed a reputation over the years as being very competent,” Zwerling said. “So is his partner.”

Liz Seccuro, the UVA alumna whose rapist had been defended by Lawrence and Quagliana, had a different take.

“They are paid to plant a tiny seed of reasonable doubt into the mind of just one juror,” she said. “It’s business. That’s all.”

Francis Lawrence had been selected as one of Virginia’s so-called “Super Lawyers” by the magazine of the same name every year since 2006. Super Lawyers is a rating service for lawyers; those chosen are selected based on peer nominations, peer evaluations, and independent research, according to its mission statement. Lawyers aren’t able to buy themselves onto the list, the organization insists, and the final list may represent no more than five percent of the lawyers in the state.

Lawrence graduated from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, first for his bachelor’s degree, which he obtained in 1971, and then for his juris doctorate, which he got in 1975. He lectured at the University of Virginia School of Law from 1989 to 1999, according to several online profiles, and once served as president of the Thomas Jefferson Inn of Court, an organization of attorneys, professors, and law students “who have an interest in litigation,” and judges who hear cases in Albemarle County. Rhonda Quagliana, nearly sixteen years Lawrence’s junior and a later addition to the 1974-established law firm on Charlottesville’s Park Street, had graduated from the University of Virginia School of law with her juris doctorate in 1995; she’d previously earned a PhD from the college in 1992. She worked as president of the Charlottesville Albemarle Bar Association, a not-for-profit professional association meant to improve the Charlottesville area’s legal profession.

The duo’s firm claims to offer “individualized and courteous attention essential to effective legal representation,” according to its online profile (www.stlawva.net). “Our attorneys have the experience and resources to handle complex cases.”

As word of Yeardley Love’s death spread through Virginia, the legal community began to speculate which lawyer would be tapped by Huguely’s wealthy family. That they chose Lawrence and Quagliana was no surprise, Zwerling said.

Journalists from throughout the East Coast, as well as those with national operations such as ESPN and TruTV (formerly CourtTV), began gearing up for the planned June preliminary hearing. So did Brendan Fitzgerald, the C-VILLE Weekly reporter, who had followed the case from its onset. When perusing the court docket, Fitzgerald noticed that on the same day in the same courthouse, another young man charged with murder was also set to have a preliminary hearing. He couldn’t help but be intrigued: The courthouse would teem with reporters covering Huguely’s case, while the other went unannounced and uncovered in a courtroom just down the hall. Fitzgerald decided to write about it.

“It was characterized by an entirely different dynamic, a different economic dynamic, a different racial dynamic,” he recalled. “And, because it involved a person involved in a completely different walk of life than George Huguely, we thought it an interesting project to put those two things side by side.”

Unlike Huguely, whose name and face had flashed across television screens and in newspapers nationwide, relatively few people had heard of nineteen-year-old Demonte Burgess. Physically, he and Huguely both stood six foot two and weighed about 200 pounds. Both had been charged with ending another human’s life. Both would see their cases begin in Charlottesville General District Court.

That’s where the similarities ended.

Burgess was black; his listed address, “homeless;” his income, “zero.” Huguely, meanwhile, came from a family owning second and third homes in the Outer Banks and Palm Beach.

Burgess’s alleged victim, thirty-two-year-old Miguel Salazar, was shot in the head on January 22 in a trailer park after what police described as an “altercation” between four Hispanic men and two black men. Salazar’s name is likely still unknown to many in the Charlottesville area; he certainly never graced the cover of People magazine after his death.

Huguely and Burgess lived just three miles apart, Fitzgerald noted in a June 8 story comparing and contrasting the men’s predicaments, but “during the four years since Huguely moved to Burgess’ hometown of Charlottesville to go to school, it seems unlikely the two would have crossed paths.”

Fitzgerald wrote the piece, he said, because as the national media swarmed Charlottesville to cover Huguely’s court hearings, he grew increasingly bemused at the picture they painted of the city. Writers used flowery words like “pastoral” and “bucolic.” Meanwhile, the area in which Burgess lived was far from pastoral. It was, basically, a rundown slum literally on the other side of the tracks from UVA’s well-to-do college kids. If ever there was a concrete example of town versus gown, this was it.

Fitzgerald compared the upbringings of Huguely and Burgess, and C-VILLE ran photos comparing the crime scene locations and the defendants’ original homesteads. While Huguely attended an expensive private school for boys, Charlottesville High School had no record Burgess ever attended. Questions about Huguely’s case were directed to, then ignored by, high-priced lawyers. When Fitzgerald approached the dilapidated duplex where Burgess had reportedly once lived, a man answering the door told him that Burgess “didn’t do that shit,” and threatened that he would “lump up” the next reporter to knock on his door.

Fitzgerald’s point was that Charlottesville couldn’t be summed up with pretty adjectives, and that while the whole nation might envision it as far removed from drugs and violence, people who really lived there knew the city had an underbelly that wasn’t reflected in the crime statistics. (Burgess’s case was forwarded to a grand jury, which determined in October 2010 there was enough evidence to send it to trial. As of now, Burgess is still awaiting trial.)

Fitzgerald’s story, posted on C-VILLE’s Web site and featured on the front page of the weekly print publication, sparked some heated debate. Some applauded him for pointing out the disparities; others accused him of “stirring the pot.” Readers of his story began commenting online just past midnight the morning it went to press. “I’m offended by your thinly veiled, baseless, and at this point quite cliché criticism of the UVA community just because of its privilege,” one commenter wrote. “Please stop indicting all of UVA in this terrible tragedy.”

It was telling, perhaps, that, despite Fitzgerald describing two separate slayings, the commenter referred to a “tragedy”—singular rather than plural.

 

As it turned out, neither Burgess nor Huguely actually had their hearings on June 10 as planned. While Burgess’s was postponed until mid-August, Huguely’s was delayed even longer, until October 7. Neither the defense nor the prosecution commented to reporters when asked why, though such delays aren’t uncommon. The wheels of justice can sometimes turn agonizingly slowly.

Huguely reportedly awaited his court dates in isolation inside a 4-foot-by-8-foot cell inside the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. Officials said he was segregated from the rest of the jail population and released about an hour a day for exercise, phone calls, or bathing. The jail, set off I-64 east of the 5th Street exit, is sprawled on a rural chunk of land away from the bustling UVA campus. Its locale, perhaps ironically, is among the most bucolic in Charlottesville. The jail was built in 1974 so that Albemarle County could shutter its outdated city and county jails. The staffs from those facilities were combined, and the Albemarle-Charlottesville Joint Security Complex was born. Its name was changed to the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail twenty-two years later, in 1996.

Aside from lawyer visits, Huguely was allowed a maximum of two visits per month, as per jailhouse rules. His family could send money to his “canteen fund”—an account from which he could buy commissary items such as shampoo, body wash, cough drops, or candy bars. Because he was segregated, he couldn’t take part in some of the jail’s inmate activities, dubbed “Beyond the Bars,” such as its art show in January 2011. Nor could he enroll in the jail’s many classes, which ranged from culinary arts to crocheting.

Jail officials declined to say why Huguely was segregated from the others. Asked by Fitzgerald, Major Adam Rodriguez vaguely replied that “it could be either for disciplinary” reasons “or for his own protection—the safety and security of him.” Despite early reports to the contrary, officials insisted Huguely had never been on suicide watch.

 

By mid-August, the October 7 court date had already been changed. Anticipating a mass of media, Charlottesville officials decided to push the date by one day and move it to the Charlottesville Circuit Court, which contained a larger courtroom than would be available in the district court.

Police Spokesman Ric Barrick told reporters that Charlottesville had turned to other cities that had handled high-profile cases for advice on how to handle the crush of journalists who surely would descend on the city come trial time. For example, they had contacted Chesapeake and Virginia Beach to find out how those cities handled the hundreds of reporters who arrived to cover the 2003 sniper trial. (In that case, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were linked to twenty shootings, resulting in thirteen deaths in Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C. Both men were ultimately convicted.)

“We’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen through the trial, or how much interest we’re going to have, but the interest has remained since the beginning of this incident,” Barrick told one reporter. “We’re going to need more space, and we’re going to need to coordinate things a little bit more carefully and strategically than we currently do in Charlottesville.”

While reporters waited to cover the preliminary hearing, bits of details in the case slowly trickled out thanks to the media consortiums’ constant pressure to have public documents released. Every few weeks, some of those details would appear under headlines such as “New info released in Huguely-Love case.” The stories would invariably be short and direct, with no quotes from family members, lawyers, or even friends of the victim or suspect.

Josh Bowers, a UVA associate law professor, said that with each new story came reinvigorated interest in the case around Charlottesville. The lulls in between developments were so lengthy that it gave people who might otherwise have grown tired of the story time to regroup and get reinvested.

“Even if they were getting sick of the massive coverage, by the time a new development occurred, the story was somewhat fresh again because the last development had occurred some months ago.”

Summer brought the first sustained breather. Aside from a smattering of quarter-turn updates, the case parties fell quiet, as did Charlottesville as a whole. The TV trucks and spotlights had been packed up and hauled away. About one-fourth of the student population had graduated, and a new crop of freshmen were enjoying that contemplative recess between high school graduation and college matriculation.

Bowers was impressed that so little leaked out.

“The parties have been somewhat admirably tight-lipped,” he said. “We want our justice system to be transparent, but we want it to be transparent during the trial process. We don’t want our cases litigated in the courts of public opinion, and by newspapers and other media. That kind of public judgment has the tendency to flip the presumption of innocence on its head. We see an exacerbation of reputational harm simply from the levying of charges itself. Ideally, you want at least to let the process play out in court without too much in the way of guilt and innocence arguments being made through media outlets. I’d rather see those arguments made in an open court.”

Plenty of journalists would have agreed with Bowers, but in August came the realization that Huguely’s first day in court might not come by year’s end.