I think they could hold off for as long as a year before they'd be forced to release him or charge him with a felony, because at that point, he'd have already served the max he could possibly get. The District Court, which the Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court only has jurisdiction to jail you for up to a year, so that would be a jurisdictional issue I think and they'd have to let him out after a year or give good cause (in the form of a felony indictment most likely) to continue holding him. I actually don't know for absolute certain.
As I understand it, it wouldn't go to District Court. There'd be a a hearing in J&DR court about whether the felony charges were valid, then it would get kicked straight up to Circuit Court.
This is mostly a moot distinction since Greene County operates a combined court, so the District and J&DR courts are actually the same staff in the same room, just using different judges on different days. The main difference would be in public access to that final hearing. Then the case would be kicked to the other wing of the building, which is where the Circuit Court is (though it counts as a separate building with its own street address).
It's not like they're going to hit a statute of limitations on rape by waiting a year. In fact I don't believe there is one.
There isn't one.
My only concern is that if they wait longer than a year to bring a felony charge, it might lose its wobbler status as it would be past the statute of limitations for a misdemeanor. I don't know how Virginia treats this situation though. (In California at least, People v. Soni holds that wobblers have the felony statute of limitations even if prosecuted as or reduced by agreement to a misdemeanor, but this was only established in 2005!)
My guess is that it won't be an issue and if for some reason the case has to take longer than a year, they'll bring any new charges up before the year has passed.
there is the year time limit like you said for that jail. so they might be able to send him to another one.
can he get bail under some type of temp living facility?
The year time limit isn't specific to the jail itself (though jails are only meant to hold people for a year), it's specific to the charge. Let's say you get charged with a crime where the max sentence is 30 days in jail, but for some crazy reason you're denied bail, they can't keep you locked up in jail past 30 days even if your trial takes longer.
People can, and do, spend many years in jail waiting for their case, as long as the maximum punishment for the crime is longer. This actually has fucked a lot of people over in overworked court systems where people who couldn't make bail wound up spending longer in jail than their eventual sentence could have been (since people usually do not receive the maximum upon sentencing).
One of the reasons he hasn't been given bail is he has noplace to go. Courts usually require you to have a place of residence that they can find you at when you post bail. In practice, in major cities, homeless people get released all the time and they just enter a homeless shelter as the residence on the bail form. This is probably not the case in Greene County.
Still, Heilberg could probably get bail if he asked for it. That he didn't even try for bail is most likely recognition that Chris is better off in jail than homeless on the streets. What is probably happening now (and this is just a guess on my part) is they are trying to find placement for Chris somewhere so they can kick him out of jail and not have to deal with him anymore. They won't pull the trigger on it until after Chris is sentenced and released, because it would be pointless to place him somewhere on bail and then have him have to go back to jail to finish a sentence.
