Chapter 30

As January got under way, people began gearing up for the anticipated preliminary hearing set for the 21st. But the month had barely started before the prosecution made an announcement that would change everything:

Huguely faced new charges.

On Friday, January 7, District Attorney Warner “Dave” Chapman issued a memo on city letterhead announcing that five additional warrants were requested and issued against Huguely. Now he faced charges of felony murder, robbery, burglary, statutory burglary, and grand larceny. Until this point, Huguely had faced one charge: first-degree murder. George was to be arraigned via video feed the following Monday in the Charlottesville General District Court.

The memo reminded reporters—and the public—that the new warrants were still nothing more than allegations. “Every person is presumed to be innocent unless and until proof beyond a reasonable doubt is established before a judge or jury.” And it suggested that Chapman expected the defense to ask that the preliminary hearing be delayed yet again.

Late in the day, Lawrence and Quagliana released a statement saying the new charges were not a surprise.

“These additional charges were not unexpected and we have been fully prepared to defend against them. We think it is significant that the amended charges acknowledge that there was no premeditation.”

Word of the new charges piqued curiosity among the gadflies. Did this imply that prosecutors no longer felt they had enough evidence to prove Huguely had intended to kill Yeardley—a necessity for a first-degree murder conviction? Or were these new charges meant to offer the defense some wiggle room in which to reach a plea deal, possibly sparing Huguely from having to face trial?

John Zwerling guessed neither. Upon hearing of the additional charges, he said they seemed as though they would be more beneficial to Huguely’s defense lawyers than to the commonwealth.

“There’s plenty of punishment attached to murder,” he said. “I imagine it would have zero effect on negotiations.”

Felony murder is a form of first-degree murder that looks quite similar on paper. Both mean you’re charged with killing someone, and if you’re convicted, you’ll likely spend life behind bars. But they differ when it comes to intent. While first-degree murder requires premeditation, felony murder means that someone died while you were committing a felony that generally is considered dangerous. For example, if a gunman robs a store and kills the resisting storeowner, he maybe didn’t go to the store to kill anyone, making it tough to prove premeditation. But because he caused the victim’s death while he was committing a robbery, he could more easily be convicted of felony murder.

Before January 7, Huguely hadn’t faced other felonies. Now, he faced several, robbery among them. According to the search warrants, the only item taken from Yeardley’s apartment during the attack was her laptop. That perhaps constituted burglary, but it raised another question of intent: Did Huguely go to the apartment to steal the laptop, or was that an afterthought? Unless prosecutors could prove that Huguely went to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment intending to bash in her door and steal her laptop, they could risk handing a jury reason to reduce the charge significantly.

Josh Bowers, the UVA associate law professor, saw the charges as a chance for the prosecution to come at the murder theory from multiple angles.

“It’s advantageous for a prosecutor to pursue a felony murder theory where such a theory is available,” Bowers said. “It provides an additional opportunity to make out the top charge—the charge of murder—without having to actually demonstrate that the defendant had a guilty, culpable mindset as to the death itself. All the prosecutor needs to do is prove that the elements of an underlying felony were met, and a death resulted.”

In short: felony plus death equals murder.

“It’s better for a prosecutor to have two theories than one,” Bowers continued. “You don’t want to have so many theories that you leave the jury confused, but having two ways to make the case is probably reasonable.”

Bowers laid out an example he teaches to students in his substantive criminal law class, a required course for first-year law students at UVA: Let’s say a man steals a car. He wants to avoid drawing the police’s attention, so he drives exceptionally carefully. He obeys speed limits, signals when he turns, and yields to passing ambulances. Despite all these precautions, a child jumps into traffic and is mowed down by the stolen car. The child dies, and the car thief is arrested. Bowers said that it would be difficult for the prosecutor to win a first-or second-degree murder case against the car thief, and it might even prove impossible to sway a jury to convict him of manslaughter because the thief was neither reckless nor grossly negligent. But it could be possible for the prosecutor to charge the thief with felony murder—because felony plus death equals murder.

“There are limitations, of course, and it varies from one state to another what felonies will serve as a predicate, as a trigger, for a felony murder charge, and there are also questions of causation,” Bowers said. But in nearly all states that have felony murder on the books, burglary and robbery charges would qualify—and now Huguely was faced with both.

Though many inmates would have happily left the confines of their jail cell for a daytrip to the courthouse, Huguely waived his right to appear at the next Monday’s arraignment in Charlottesville General District Court. Instead, his lawyers appeared alone—and indeed asked for more time to review the newly added charges.

“Judge, I can say that both sides have been moving with diligence, and the commonwealth certainly has been cooperative, but there is a bunch of stuff still out there,” Lawrence said in court.

He and Quagliana still needed to analyze about twenty of the more than 100 pieces of evidence collected against their client in the case, Lawrence added. Judge Downer agreed to the continuance, saying that justice would be better served if the case weren’t rushed to a preliminary hearing. The latest rescheduling marked the third time the defense won a delay, first from June to October, then from October to January, and now until April. No one ever accused the wheels of justice of spinning too quickly.

The sides couldn’t immediately agree on a date that worked for everyone, but within a week, they had settled on April 11—three weeks shy of the one-year anniversary of Yeardley’s death.