By Heather Michon, correspondent
A Palmyra man was sentenced in Fluvanna County Circuit Court Thursday (July 5) following his conviction for an incidence of domestic violence.
Daryl Carver, 33, was found guilty following a trial in March on charges of abduction, strangulation, and attempted malicious wounding in an altercation between Carver, his girlfriend, and her former boyfriend in late 2017, along with an assault and battery charge from earlier in 2017.
During his sentencing hearing, Carver told Judge Richard E. Moore that he had become addicted to heroin and moved on to smoking methamphetamine, an addiction that cost him a good-paying job in construction. By late 2017, he was using meth on a daily basis.
He said he was high and had gone without sleep for about a week when he got into a fight with his girlfriend of six months and her former boyfriend in the fall of 2017.
At trial, Carver denied strangling the victim. During the hearing on Thursday, he said he couldn’t answer regarding evidence presented showing marks on the victim’s neck.
“Do you really remember everything from that incident?” Moore asked. Carver admitted he may have blacked out.
He insisted that his months in Central Virginia Regional Jail (CVRJ) had reformed him. “I realized I was headed down a dark path,” he said. “I acted out of proportion.”
During his time at CVRJ, he had gotten clean and was continuing substance abuse counseling.
His mother, Lynda Carver, took the stand to vouch for the changes she had seen in him in recent months.
After several years of struggling with drug abuse, “I believe he has transformed himself a lot,” she told the judge. She said there was a job waiting for him with her construction company whenever he was released.
Carver’s attorney, Richard Harry, asked for home electronic incarceration, and his mother promised if he were released to her supervision “he will be like a child back at home. He will walk the straight line; he will work every day; he will be the man he was before.”
Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Todd Shockey asked the judge to consider imposing a sentence in the middle to upper end of the guidelines. While Carver had clearly made strides to better himself, he said, “his conduct could have killed” the victim.
In his closing argument, Harry described this as an unsurprising end of a relationship for “two meth-heads on a bender.” He noted that the victim had fallen out of contact with prosecutors and hadn’t submitted a victim impact statement.
He asked the judge for “something below the low end of the recommendation.”
In his final statement to the judge, Carver said, “I’d like to apologize for any inconvenience I’ve caused. I realize what I did was wrong.”
“I don’t know what the right sentence is here,” Moore said as he contemplated his decision. He said he appreciated Carver’s candor and the steps he was making to get clean, but what he had done “was not justified.”
In the end, Moore imposed a total sentence of 17 years on the charges and suspended all but three years and three months. Carver will have to serve three years on supervised probation and 12 years on good behavior.
It’s not clear if Carver will stay at CVRJ or be taken to state prison. Moore said if Carver was taken to prison, he preferred him to be sent to Indian Creek Correctional Center in Chesapeake, which has a treatment center for substance abusers. If he remains at CVRJ, Moore said he might consider ordering him to work release after serving at least one year of his sentence.
