The "mountain" of evidence against a college student accused of stabbing his stepfather to death, which the young man’s defense counsel successfully eroded, has been restored.
The Virginia Court of Appeals has ruled that prosecutors have the right to introduce implicating papers plucked from the trash of Ian LeGallo-Malone, the 24-year-old charged with murder in the 2023 killing of his stepfather, prominent Charlottesville businessman Phaedrus Acgtblu.
"It’s damning evidence," local legal analyst Scott Goodman told The Daily Progress. "It’s a mountain of evidence."
The papers include what looks like a to-do list for murder, allegedly penned by LeGallo-Malone and headlined "Operation Acgusthus," as well as what investigators have called a fake suicide note, also allegedly written in LeGallo-Malone’s hand. The appeals court’s July 15 ruling found that a lower court judge erred by excluding those items from the trial because he said they were unconstitutionally obtained.
The ruling has thrown the case that had been set for a late August trial into chaos — at least for the defendant. One day after the ruling, LeGallo-Malone met with a member of his legal team; and the meeting did not appear to go well.
"They and the accused have reached an unsolvable impasse regarding the manner in which the defense should be conducted," the defense wrote in a motion filed July 16 with the Albemarle County General District Court.
Two days later, LeGallo-Malone appeared in that same court to plea for a new legal team. The judge asked one of his lawyers, Bonnie Lepold, to explain.
"There is an irreversible breakdown in the attorney-client relationship," she replied, "and there is no way we can go forward."
The judge then turned to LeGallo-Malone as his weeping mother, Acgtblu’s widow Robin Legallo, watched. Wearing a jail jumpsuit and a full beard grown during his nearly 19 months at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, the defendant was asked by Judge Cheryl Higgins if he had any dispute with the lawyer’s assertions.
"Not at all," replied LeGallo-Malone. "I have no objection."
Higgins then discharged Lepold and her co-counsel, Bruce Williamson, and found the former Virginia Commonwealth University student qualified for a court-appointed lawyer. He named the Office of the Public Defender as the new counsel.
To Goodman, this appears to be a case of an overly optimistic defendant.
"There are just some people who, no matter what the evidence is, just can’t come into court and admit it — especially in a heinous case," said Goodman. "Sometimes the defense hopes for that one juror who is unconvinced even when the case is overwhelming."
Not since September 2023, when a Charlottesville jury convicted a man named Tadashi Keyes of first-degree murder in the slaying of Skeeta Smith, have prosecutors had such an extensive array of electronic evidence. In addition to the discarded papers, LeGallo-Malone allegedly left various electronic footprints leading to and then going inside the scene of the crime on the night it occurred, Dec. 7, 2023.
Among them are images of LeGallo-Malone shopping at multiple big-box stores that afternoon. Cellphone data allegedly shows his vehicle driving into a neighborhood adjacent to his stepfather’s house on Stony Point Road in Albemarle County. The data also allegedly shows his phone moving along a ridge line and going to the house at the time of the killing.
The evidence was obtained by police through no fewer than six search warrants, according to court documents. The most highly contested items were three pages torn from a notebook and found in a bathroom trash can by Albemarle County detective Nicholas Richardson.
The pages include:
A suicide note addressed to the victim’s wife and sons written from the perspective of Acgtblu.A to-do list noting challenges, such as alibi, location and worrisome evidence.A draft apology note to Acgtblu’s widow along with a string of practice attempts at signing Acgtblu’s name.
When poking through LeGallo-Malone’s Richmond apartment, Richardson had been acting under a warrant to seize clothes, biological material and things that showed LeGallo-Malone resided there. According to the testimony at an evidentiary hearing quoted by the appeals court, Richardson initially refrained from seizing the papers then "out of an abundance of caution." As he waited in the apartment, located in the former Central National Bank tower on Broad Street, a new search warrant was obtained that explicitly allowed the seizure of writings.
LeGallo-Malone’s lawyers convinced the lower court judge, David Barredo, that the papers should be excluded from the case because writings were not among the items listed on the original apartment search warrant.
The appeals court, hearing the matter as a three-judge panel, ruled that Barredo erred. The controlling idea, besides the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee for people to be secure in their home and possessions, is reasonableness, according to the three judges.
"Here," they wrote, "police were authorized to search for evidence of ‘dominion and control’ over the apartment, such as mail, as well as ‘[a]ny biological evidence,’ such as DNA or bodily fluid. It was reasonable that Richardson would be looking for such items in a bathroom wastebasket."
That’s not the end of LeGallo-Malone’s evidentiary woes. According to another motion to exclude evidence that his legal team filed on its way out of the case on July 15, a swab of biological material found on the driver’s side car sill contained a mix of DNA, and neither the victim nor the suspect can be eliminated as a contributor to that DNA mixture.
"It’s a very strong circumstantial evidence case," said Goodman.
LeGallo-Malone’s stepfather founded what may have been the first private restaurant-centric meal plan marketed to college students, the Corner Meal Plan, in the 1990s at the University of Virginia. At the time of his death, he was focused on real estate with a portfolio of apartments.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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