Evolving charges

On August 12, 2017, a group of people were in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, counterprotesting white nationalists. James Fields, Jr., a man with a reported fascination for Nazis, apparently deliberately drove his car into a crowd. He killed one person, Heather Heyer, and injured dozens more. Just last week, prosecutors announced they’d be seeking a first degree murder conviction against him. For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting on some issues related to this case.

Today I’m going to talk about how criminal charges might evolve in a case.

In a typical criminal case, a person is arrested by police. The police report will list at least one potential criminal violation; police are supposed to have probable cause to believe that the suspect has committed this crime.

The prosecutor will review the report and decide whether to pursue the case (incidentally, this is one reason why police must have decent writing skills). If the prosecutor opts to go forward, she’ll issue something called a criminal complaint. This will specify the parts of the criminal code which the defendant is alleged to have violated. These charges may or may not be the same crimes named in the arrest report because the prosecutor may find that fewer, additional, or different offenses are better substantiated.

Within a short period of time—usually two business days—the defendant will be arraigned. As part of this process, he’ll be informed of the charges in the complaint.

In Fields’s case, the complaint charged him with second degree murder along with a slew of lesser offenses such as malicious wounding.

After the arraignment, the prosecutor will conduct additional investigations (as will the defense attorney). Eventually there will be a probable cause hearing, the purpose of which is to determine whether there’s sufficient evidence to proceed with the case. That hearing may be a preliminary hearing, in front of a judge, or it may be a grand jury proceeding, in front of a group of citizens. In either case, the prosecutor has to produce enough evidence for the charges to stick. And sometimes, perhaps pursuant to additional evidence that’s been collected, those charges may be different from those in the complaint.

That’s what’s happened in Fields’s case. The preliminary hearing was last week, and the prosecutor opted to upgrade the most serious charge from second to first degree murder. The judge found enough evidence to support first degree, so that’s the charge Fields now faces.

In some cases, charges may continue to evolve after the probable cause hearing. Prosecutors may drop some charges or, pursuant to a plea bargain, defendants might plead guilty to a lesser offense.

Next week: the difference between first and second degree murder.

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