A person indicted for felony shall be personally present during the trial therefor. If he refuse to plead or answer, and do not confess his guilt, the court shall have the plea of not guilty entered, and the trial shall proceed as if the accused had entered that plea, and judgment upon the verdict in any such trial shall be entered up as in cases of misdemeanor. The formal arraignment of the prisoner, the proclamation by the sheriff, and the charge of the clerk to the jury, as heretofore practiced, shall be dispensed with.
W. Va. Code § 62-3-2
Presence of accused during trial; arraignment; plea
Applied in 6 court decisions — leading case 167 W. Va. 411 - State v. Daggett (1981)
Most recently applied in State of West Virginia v. Timothy Ray Sutherland (June 2013)
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: West Virginia Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain West Virginia statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.