Kanawha County, West Virginia

How a case moves here

Kanawha County follows West Virginia law on arrests, release, and courts. These rules are the same in every county in the state; the full set covers prosecutors, defense, and jails too.

Who decides release first: A county magistrate sets bail first, with an on-call magistrate for arrests after hours. Magistrates need not be lawyers. Only the circuit court can release a person charged with an offense punishable by life in prison.
W. Va. Code 62-1C-1 W. Va. Code 62-1-5
Time to see a judge: An officer must take an arrested person "without unnecessary delay" before a magistrate of the county where the arrest happened. The law sets no number of hours.
W. Va. Code 62-1-5(a)(1)
Money bail: Magistrates and judges may set money bail.
W. Va. Code 62-1C-1
Courts: Circuit courts try all felonies and some misdemeanors and hear appeals from the lower courts. Magistrate courts in every county hear most misdemeanors and hold preliminary hearings in felony cases. Municipal courts hear city ordinance violations.
Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, Circuit Courts Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, Magistrate Courts
Judges and magistrates: Voters elect circuit judges in nonpartisan elections for eight-year terms, and circuit judges must have practiced law for five years. Voters elect magistrates in nonpartisan elections for four-year terms. The state constitution bars requiring magistrates to be lawyers, and the law asks only for a high school education.
Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, Circuit Courts Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, Magistrate Courts W. Va. Code 50-1-4

Read from the statutes and court rules cited, 2026-09-30. Some of this is medium confidence and still being checked. The name of the Supreme Court-approved risk instrument was not found. Whether jailers release on a bail schedule without a magistrate was not found.

What this county does differently

Pretrial practice

Mapping Pretrial Injustice listed its risk tool in 2021 as the Ohio Risk Assessment System Pretrial Assessment Tool (ORAS-PAT).

MediaJustice and Movement Alliance Project, Mapping Pretrial Injustice county map (data as of fall 2021)

From Mapping Pretrial Injustice, a map compiled by MediaJustice and the Movement Alliance Project, advocacy groups that campaign against pretrial risk assessment tools. Its data is from fall 2021; CrimeDB uses it only where no court, government, or research list covers the county.

Police agencies

Agencies: FBI NIBRS master file 2025 batch headers; names from the FBI agency list, pulled 2026-09-29. An agency that serves several counties appears on each. Population served is the FBI's figure.

Crime and arrests

No figures yet

Reported offenses and arrests for Kanawha County, counted by the agencies that serve it, appear here once the county series is published. NIBRS reporting here started as early as January 1998.