No person who is arrested on a charge of felony shall be denied a preliminary hearing upon the question of whether there is reasonable ground to believe that he committed the offense and no indictment shall be returned in a court of record against any such person prior to such hearing unless such hearing is waived in writing by the accused.
Va. Code Ann. § 19.2-218
Preliminary hearing required for person arrested on charge of felony; waiver
Applied in 8 court decisions — leading case 27 Va. App. 697 - Lebedun v. Commonwealth (1998)
Most recently applied in 90 Va. Cir. 435 - Commonwealth v. Poe (August 2015)
Code 1950, § 19.1-163.1; 1960, c. 389; 1975, c. 495.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: Virginia Law Portal (LIS). Reproduced from public-domain Virginia statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.