A district court judge set a $5,000 bond for former Del. Matt Fariss in Lynchburg General District Court on Thursday morning, nearly five days after the ex-lawmaker’s Saturday night arrest on drug and firearm charges in Campbell County.
Judge Stephanie Maddox presided over the bond hearing and stipulated that Fariss’ freedom until his June 4 preliminary hearing will also be contingent upon random drug and alcohol tests and on Fariss seeking drug abuse treatment.
Maddox, who was named a judge in the 24th Judicial District in 2015, recused herself when Fariss was charged in an alleged hit-and-run case last year. She did not do so on Thursday.
This was the third time Fariss was scheduled to appear in court for a bond hearing. A Monday internet outage at the Campbell County Courthouse and Tuesday scheduling conflicts with the appointed special prosecutor from Nelson County precipitated the delay. Thursday’s hearing was moved from Campbell County to Lynchburg to accommodate the judge’s schedule.
Fariss’ attorney, Lynchburg-based Chuck Felmlee, said he was happy to see his client get bond. As of noon, jail records still showed Fariss in custody.
“He’s 55. He has no record,” Felmlee said. “We’re going to do everything we can to prove he’s going to stay clean the next couple of months and come back and hopefully reach a resolution.”
Erik Laub, the chief deputy commonwealth’s attorney in Nelson County, is the special prosecutor in the case. Nelson County’s commonwealth’s attorney, Daniel Rutherford, “screened himself out of the case,” Laub said, due to a personal relationship with Fariss.
“The way I’m going to try and approach this case is just like I would with anybody else,” Laub said Thursday following the bond hearing, adding that he was satisfied with the stipulations of the bond.
Fariss was arrested Saturday night following a traffic stop in Campbell County on charges of drug possession, illegal possession of a firearm and violation of a protective order, arrest records show. He was also cited for improper tail lights and failure to obey highway markings.
Further details of the stop surfaced in court Thursday morning. A K-9 unit was involved in the stop of the pickup truck Fariss uses on his Campbell County cattle farming operation, Felmlee told the court, and officers discovered a substance that field-tested positive for methamphetamine in the former delegate’s rear left pocket. A hunting rifle used on the farm was in the truck, and Fariss had ammunition for the gun in another pocket.
A protective order obtained last year against Fariss stipulated he surrender all firearms.
The protective order stems from a March 2023 case in which Fariss was charged with felony malicious wounding and leaving the scene of an accident in an incident that injured Julie Miles, a woman he was seeing romantically. He was acquitted of the felony charges but convicted of reckless driving. The protective order expires in August 2025.
Felmlee argued that the gun’s presence in the truck was not as serious an offense as it might seem at face value.
“The family uses hunting rifles to kill groundhogs and whatnot on the farm,” Felmlee said in court. “It sounds worse because it sounds like a violation of a protective order.”
Laub said he still needed to study the details of the protective order but expects his office to explore a different, potentially lesser charge, on Fariss’ possession of the firearm.
“If he had committed an act of violence on the protected person or if he had attempted to contact the protected person, that’s a whole different category,” Laub said. “There is an actual danger there to himself, the community or that particular person.”
There is no evidence that Fariss threatened or attempted to contact Miles.
As for Fariss’ time in jail since Saturday, Felmlee said he understood the delays.
“It’s been tough, yeah,” the attorney said. “This is a little of a different situation because a special prosecutor was appointed. … This was the first time we could actually do it.”
Laub said he was as eager to get the bond hearing done as the defense was.
“I’m just glad that everybody was willing to do it the way they were today, because obviously, it doesn’t matter who it is, if they were sitting in jail and they don’t need to be sitting in jail, that’s as much a manifest injustice to the commonwealth as it is to the defense,” Laub said.
Fariss, a Republican, represented the 59th House District from 2012 until January. He missed the filing deadline for the Republican nomination in the latest cycle but filed paperwork to run as an independent in June. Republican nominee Eric Zehr defeated him and Democrat Kimberly Moran in the November general election.
The preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled for 9 a.m. on June 4 in Campbell County.
