Jury Finds
Rally Organizers Responsible for Charlottesville Violence
Jurors
found the main organizers of the deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville,
Va., in 2017 liable under state law, awarding more than $25 million in damages,
but deadlocked on federal conspiracy charges.
Neil
MacFarquhar
By Neil
MacFarquhar
Nov. 23,
2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/us/charlottesville-rally-verdict.html
CHARLOTTESVILLE,
Va. — Jurors on Tuesday found the main organizers of the deadly far-right rally
in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 liable under state law for injuries to
counterprotesters, awarding more than $25 million in damages. But the jury
deadlocked on two federal conspiracy charges.
Still, the
verdict was a clear rebuke of the defendants
— a mix of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Confederate sympathizers.
They were found under Virginia law to have engaged in a conspiracy that led to
injuries during the rally. The “Unite the Right” march began as a demonstration
over the removal of a Confederate statue and led to the death of the
counterprotester Heather Heyer, 32, when she was struck by a car driven by one
of the defendants.
The civil
suit, heard in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville, was filed by four men
and five women, including four of the people who were injured when Ms. Heyer
was killed. The plaintiffs, whose injuries included concussions and a shattered
leg, testified that they suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder,
insomnia, the inability to concentrate, flashbacks and panic attacks.
All sought
compensatory and unspecified punitive damages, including payment for medical
costs as well as $3 million to $10 million for pain and suffering depending on
the degree of their injuries.
The
counterprotesters’ lawyers said that they were considering pursuing a retrial
on the federal conspiracy claim. However, the verdict that was returned
achieved the same ends in holding the rally’s organizers responsible for
violence motivated by racial, religious or ethnic animosity, they said.
“Each and
every one of them was found to be part of a conspiracy, and these award damage numbers
send a message,” said Karen L. Dunn, one of the lead lawyers for the
plaintiffs.
The largest
sums were awarded for punitive damages, with 12 individuals ordered to pay
$500,000 apiece while five white nationalist organizations were assessed $1 million
each. Any punitive damages paid will be divided evenly among the plaintiffs.
James
Fields, already serving multiple life sentences for murdering the
counterprotester with his car, was found
liable for $12 million in punitive damages, as well as hundreds of thousands of
dollars for medical expenses stemming from assault, battery and emotional
distress.
Lawyers for
the far-right organizers said they would seek to reduce those amounts, and
there was little chance that their clients could pay in any event. “The
defendants in this case are destitute, none of them have any money,” said Joshua Smith, who represented Matthew
Heimbach, Matthew Parrott and the Traditionalist Worker Party, modeled on the
Germany’s Nazi Party.
Mr. Smith
sought to portray the decision as a victory for his clients, saying that the
lawyers for the other side had expected to “waltz through” the case. A small
group of protesters shouted “Get out of town!” at him as he stepped up to
address reporters outside the federal courthouse.
Legal
experts, however, said that the jury’s decision came down heavily on the side
of the plaintiffs. “Though there is some ambiguity in the verdict, the bottom
line is that the jury found for the plaintiffs and awarded significant
compensatory and punitive damages,” said Richard C. Schragger, a professor at
the University of Virginia Law School who had been following the case closely.
Mr. Schragger said the outstanding question was why the jury found a racial
conspiracy to commit violence under state law but deadlocked over a similar
provision of federal law.
He and
others noted the explanation of the federal statute in the instructions
received by the jury was slightly more complex, including references to
constitutional amendments and civil rights.
The lawyers
for the counterprotesters said that in addition to holding march organizers
responsible for the violence, they hoped to deter hate groups from mounting
similar toxic spectacles in the future, relying on civil suits in the absence
of decisive action by the criminal justice system.
The rally
in 2017, which featured extremists carrying torches and chanting racist
slogans, was organized as a protest against the removal of a statue of Robert
E. Lee that has since been dismantled. But its broader aim was to move the far
right from the internet fringes into the national mainstream.
Many of
them readily admitted to their racial animosity, but said they were exercising
their First Amendment rights with a legal permit for the rally, not
participating in a conspiracy to commit violence. They blamed the violence
entirely on Mr. Fields, the demonstrator who mowed down counterprotesters with
his car.
The jury
was asked to decide whether each of the defendants had engaged in a conspiracy,
and, if so, what compensation should be paid to the nine people suing them.
The jury
began deliberating on Friday. The 77 pages of instructions from the judge
explained how engaging in a conspiracy did not require all participants to
forge an agreement or meet in the same room, or even to know one another. Nor
did a conspiracy require the participants to have caused the violence
themselves. The main point was that they all shared an objective and could
foresee the violence that occurred.
The
plaintiffs drew a line from Mr. Fields through all the organizations that
participated, linking him first to Vanguard America, the group that he marched
with in Charlottesville, and then to the other organizations and their leaders.
Lawyers for the far-right protesters argued that it was just online chatter that did not amount to
strong ties between them, much less a conspiracy. None of the other defendants knew Mr. Fields
beforehand, they said, and he was not involved in organizing the event.
The
four-week trial, long delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, underscored
how much the rally organizers and their groups were already sidelined,
squabbling among themselves and financially strapped in the wake of the violent
debacle in Charlottesville. Mr. Spencer, who defended himself during the trial,
described the case in 2020 as “financially crippling.” Seven defendants ignored
the proceedings. Their cases will be addressed separately by the court.
If many
far-right players have been shunted aside, the ideology has not been. In recent
decades, whenever far-right groups have lost in court, the movement has
rebounded.
“While some
of the messengers have been eviscerated, the more mainstream versions of their
hatemongering continue to have real currency, with broad exposure guaranteeing
that the violence of the far-right fringes will unfortunately continue,” said
Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at
California State University, San Bernardino.
In seeking
to prove that the violence was foreseeable, the plaintiffs highlighted how
often the idea of hitting protesters with cars came up beforehand.
Samantha
Froelich, who was dating two of the main organizers simultaneously in the
lead-up to the rally, but who has since left the movement, testified that
hitting protesters with cars was discussed at a party earlier that summer in
the “Fash Loft,” short for fascist, the nickname for Mr. Spencer’s apartment in
Alexandria, Va.
After the
violence, Mr. Parrott, whose
Traditionalist Worker Party has since disbanded, and the others
celebrated. “Charlottesville was a tremendous victory,” he said in a post. “The
alt-right is not a pathetic and faceless internet fad, but a fearsome
street-fighting force.”
While the
plaintiffs’ case took three weeks and 36 witnesses, the defendants rested after
a day and a half, having made four broad arguments. First, they argued that
while others might deplore their views, the First Amendment allowed them.
Second, that they acted in self-defense. Third, that the police were to blame
for not keeping the opposing sides apart. Fourth, that none of them could
anticipate what Mr. Fields did because none knew him.
The trial
brought to life the hatred and anger espoused by the far-right groups,
especially on the streets of Charlottesville. A torch-lit march on the eve of
the rally, with hundreds of men chanting racist slogans, evoked Ku Klux Klan
and Nazi marches. The testimony as well as the many videos and social media
posts introduced were awash in the iconography of hate, with Nazi symbols and
stiff-armed salutes, with admiration for Hitler and claims that nonwhite races
were inferior.
Supporters
of the far-right maintained a cheering section online full of expletive-laced
rants against Black and Jewish people, while the defendants themselves weighed
in with commentary. In an online interview, Michael Hill, 69, president of the
League of the South, which seeks to establish a white ethno-state, called the
courtroom a “front line” in the battle.
While
testifying, Mr. Hill was asked to read part of a pledge that he had posted
online. “I pledge to be a white supremacist, racist, antisemite, homophobe, a
xenophobe, an Islamophobe and any other sort of phobe that benefits my people,
so help me God,” he read with apparent enthusiasm. He added: “I still hold
those views.”
Lawyers for
the white supremacists had argued that such messages of hate were not enough to
prove the plaintiffs’ case.
“They’ve
proven to you that the alt-right is the alt-right — they are racists; they are
antisemites,” James Kolenich, one of the defense lawyers, said in closing
arguments. “But what does that do to prove a conspiracy?”
The lawyers
for the plaintiffs said that the verdict was a condemnation of what happened in
2017 in Charlottesville.
“I think
this verdict is a message today that this country does not tolerate violence
based on racial and religious hatred in any form, and that no one will ever
bring violence to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, ever again,” said
Roberta Kaplan, the lead attorney who organized the case through a nonprofit
organization called Integrity First for America.
Neil
MacFarquhar is a national correspondent. Previously, as Moscow bureau chief, he
was on the team awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. He
spent more than 15 years reporting from around the Mideast, including five as
Cairo bureau chief, and wrote two books about the region. @NeilMacFarquhar
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