Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
After 4 years, ‘Unite the Right’ trial ready to start
Victims of Va. rally: Violence planned by far-right extremists
The violent rally started with a mob of men brandishing burning torches in the heart of a U.S. city while chanting racist, antisemitic slogans, and it ended with a woman murdered, scarring a nation.
Now, more than four years later, a civil trial starting Monday in Charlottesville, Virginia, will revisit those unsettling events.
The lawsuit in federal court against two dozen organizers of the march will examine one of the most violent manifestations of far-right views in recent history. Since the rally in August 2017, extremist ideology has seeped from the online world and surfaced in other violence, including street clashes in Portland, Oregon, and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The federal government has called the rise of domestic extremism a lethal threat to the United States.
The plaintiffs accuse the organizers of the Charlottesville rally of plotting to foment the violence that left them injured, while the defendants counter that their views constituted free speech, however offensive others might find it, and that the bloodshed stemmed from self-defense.
The 24 defendants, including 10 organizations, are a collection of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klan sympathizers and other adherents of extremist ideology. The case will underscore some of the most divisive fault lines segmenting the United States, including the claim by members of the far right that the existence of the white race is under threat.
“The trial will provide a detailed look into the world of far-right extremism and organization, but that world should not be understood as an outlier,” said Richard Schragger, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “Though some of the groups and individuals targeted by the lawsuit seem fringe and marginal, their ideas and the wider conspiracy-mongering and propensity to violence that they represent is alive and well in the U.S.”
The Charlottesville march, known as the “Unite the Right” rally, took place over two days to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a downtown park. Some 600 far-right participants gathered from around the country. The clashes that erupted culminated with one participant ramming his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and leaving at least 19 other injured, including four plaintiffs in this lawsuit.
The events further inflamed the country when President Donald Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
The trial is expected to last at least four weeks. It has been postponed repeatedly because of the COVID19 pandemic.
To make their case, lawyers for the plaintiffs are trying to combine online evidence with a law from the Civil War era.
They are using chat conversations leaked from Discord, a platform for game enthusiasts, as well as a raft of telephone texts, tweets and other social media posts to try to prove that the organizers participated in a conspiracy to foment violence against a racial minority, which is illegal. The posts that will be used overflow with derogatory remarks about Black people, Jews and activists from movements like Black Lives Matter and antifa.
Proving a conspiracy is fundamental to the prosecutors, and their strategy is anchored in a federal law from 1871 that is often called the Ku Klux Klan Act. Designed to prevent the Klan from denying freed slaves their civil rights, its provisions even outlawed moving about “in disguise upon the public highway” in order to deprive others of equal protection under the law.
Once considered obscure, the law has seen renewed popularity in recent lawsuits involving protests. It is one of the few laws that allow people to accuse fellow citizens, rather than the government, of depriving them of civil rights.
The plaintiffs are a cross-section of Virginia residents — they include an ordained minister, a landscaper and several students. In addition to claiming that a conspiracy deprived them of their civil rights, they are seeking both compensatory and punitive damages for injuries, lost income and severe emotional distress. No sum has been specified.
James Alex Fields Jr., a neo-Nazi now serving multiple life sentences in a federal prison for killing Heyer and injuring others with his car, is among the defendants. The hundreds of exhibits the prosecution has collected include a picture of his bedroom decorated with a Adolf Hitler poster and a copy of “Mein Kampf ” on a bedside table.