State court will not toss man's drugs, weapons convictions in Dinwiddie County
RICHMOND – The state Court of Appeals denied a Brunswick County man’s request to throw out his 2022 drug and weapons convictions in Dinwiddie County due to an illegal search and uncertainty about the evidence chain.
In his appeal, Preston John Thomas Hamlin, of Alberta, said the trial court denied his request to suppress evidence seized when Dinwiddie deputies detained him three years ago on U.S. Route 460. He also claimed that he was not properly read his Miranda rights and that the deputies did not have probable cause to detain him at the scene.
Court records indicated that Hamlin was driving in the wrong direction on Route 460 and had stopped in the middle of the highway when a deputy approached him.
After repeated requests from the deputy to get out of the car, Hamlin finally obliged. When he did, a bullet fell from his lap.
A second deputy showed up and noticed through the driver’s door open window an AR-15 rifle “standing straight up in the passenger side seat with a double drum on it” and “a pistol with an extended magazine laying on the driver’s side floorboard,” court records stated. A further search of Hamlin’s vehicle uncovered six bags of narcotics, two loaded pistols and seven boxes of ammunition.
The deputies also said Hamlin had admitted to having previous felony convictions prior to any search or the reading of his rights.
At his trial, Hamlin raised questions about the legality of the search because he originally told the deputies he did not want them searching his sister’s vehicle. He also said at the time he was stopped that he had been drinking and stopped the car in the middle of the highway because he was “lost and confused.”
Concerning the evidence, Hamlin maintained that prosecutors did not follow the state code for chain of custody of evidence because it was never specified who from the Dinwiddie Sheriff’s Office took the drugs to a Richmond laboratory for analysis. Circuit Court Judge Dennis Martin, who presided over Hamlin’s trial, denied all of Hamlin’s motions to dismiss the charges and convicted him on four counts of narcotics possession with intent to distribute and two weapons charges – one for possessing a weapon while also possessing narcotics, and the other for weapons possession by a convicted felon.
In the ruling issued Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals dismissed all of Hamlin’s claims. The panel said evidence presented at the trial proved that the prosecution “met its burden of proof.”
The judges acknowledged Hamlin’s assertion that the commonwealth did not establish the identity of the person who took the evidence to Richmond. However, it believed the deputy’s testimony that he “sealed, initialed, and locked the evidence in a secure facility, that someone from the sheriff’s office is responsible for transporting that evidence to the laboratory, and that the certificate of analysis described sealed envelopes containing evidence exactly like that” obtained at the scene.
"That testimony is enough to establish with reasonable certainty that the laboratory tested the same evidence that [was] collected,” the panel wrote.
Hamlin was sentenced to 67 years in prison with 56 years suspended. Now 37, he is being held at the Lunenburg County Correctional Center and is set to be released in October 2033.
Bill Atkinson (he/him/his) is an award-winning journalist who covers breaking news, government and politics. Reach him at batkinson@progress-index.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @BAtkinson_PI.
This article originally appeared on The Progress-Index: Court of Appeals upholds 2022 drugs and weapons convictions in Dinwiddie
