Jury finds Unite the Right organizers responsible for Charlottesville violence

Jurors have found the main organizers of the deadly ‘Unite the Right’ white nationalist rally in Charlottesville to be responsible for injuries to nine counter-protestors, who will be awarded $25million in damages.

After a nearly monthlong civil trial, the jury deadlocked on two key claims but found the white nationalists liable on four other counts, including engaging in a conspiracy leading up to the rally.

Attorney Roberta Kaplan said the plaintiffs’ lawyers plan to refile the suit so a new jury can decide the two claims this jury could not reach a verdict on.

The money was awarded to nine people – four men and five women – who suffered injuries during the right-wing rally in August of 2017. What started in protest of the removal of a confederate statue quickly became violent when an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler rammed his car into a crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring four of the plaintiffs.

The case in US District Court in Charlottesville was brought by the nine plaintiffs, who suffered extreme physical injuries, including three concussions and a skull fracture. In addition to their physical injuries, plaintiffs testified that they suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, had trouble concentrating, terrorizing flashbacks and panic attacks.

All were seeking compensatory and unspecified punitive damages.

The verdict, though mixed, is a rebuke to the white nationalist movement, including the two dozen individuals and organizations accused in a federal lawsuit of orchestrating violence against African Americans, Jews and others in a meticulously planned conspiracy.

One of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, Alan Levine, said: ‘We are gratified by the outcome in this case in which the jury found that the leaders of the white supremacist movement intended to incite violence in Charlottesville.’

White nationalist leader Richard Spencer vowed to appeal, claiming the ‘entire theory of that verdict is fundamentally flawed.’

Spencer argued the plaintiffs’ attorneys used the case to purposefully bankrupt him and other defendants, calling it ‘activism by means of lawsuits,’ adding, ‘that is absolutely outrageous.’

Lawyers for the plaintiffs invoked a 150-year-old law passed after the Civil War to shield freed slaves from violence and protect their civil rights. The law is a rarely used provision that allows private citizens to sue other citizens for civil rights violations, and has been commonly called the Ku Klux Klan Act.

The jury in Charlottesville was asked to consider whether the white supremacists and hate groups conspired to commit racially motivated violence during the weekend of the rally.

Then-President Donald Trump was criticized following the deadly event for saying there were ‘fine people on both sides’.

President Joe Biden has frequently cited the torch-lit march and Trump’s response as the event that sparked his decision to launch another run for the White House, after two previous unsuccessful campaigns.

On one side were hundreds of white nationalists that touched down in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee from the University of Virginia campus. During the march, white nationalists chanted ‘Jews will not replace us,’ surrounded counter-protesters and threw tiki torches at them.

After two days of protest a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi amped up the violence, driving his car into a crowd of counter protesters, killing one and injuring dozens of others.

The driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr, is serving life in prison for murder and hate crimes.

Fields is one of 24 defendants named in the lawsuit, which also accused some of the nation’s best-known white nationalists of plotting the violence.

Those named include Jason Kessler, the rally’s main organizer; Richard Spencer, who coined the term ‘alt-right,’ and Christopher Cantwell, known as the ‘crying Nazi’ for posting a tearful video when a warrant was issued for his arrest after he pepper sprayed counter-demonstrators.

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