“Broadly, all the groups in Charlottesville have burned up in the aftermath of the event,” said Michael Edison Hayden, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate and other extremist ideology across the United States. The defense lawyers still working all either rejected or ignored requests for comment. Some have ignored the proceedings or destroyed materials requested in discovery, provoking fines, court sanctions or default judgments that already link them to a conspiracy.Ī few lawyers withdrew because various defendants stopped paying them and at least one continued to threaten the other side. The 14 individuals and 10 organizations do not have a unified strategy for their defense. The defendants and their lawyers have argued in interviews and in court papers that while others might find their views odious, they were exercising their First Amendment right to self-expression, and any prior discussion about violence came in the context of defending themselves. 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. The plaintiffs are a cross-section of Virginia residents - they include an ordained minister, a landscaper and several students. Last summer, Charlottesville took down the statue of Lee, as well as one of Stonewall Jackson. They were asked to rate their level of concern about racism against both Black and white people, their opinion on the removal of Confederate statues and how familiar they are with groups like Black Lives Matter. The 16-page questionnaire sent to prospective jurors this month illustrated some of the combustible issues that could emerge during the trial. All the costs of the legal work for the plaintiffs are being donated, while a nonprofit organization called Integrity First for America has raised the other financing needed. Kaplan, a New York lawyer who has shaped the case from the beginning. “This movement and these groups only seem to grow and to flourish and to be emboldened,” said Roberta A. It is one of the few laws that allow people to accuse fellow citizens, rather than the government, of depriving them of civil rights. Once considered arcane, the law has seen renewed popularity in recent lawsuits involving protests. 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. 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. The posts that will be used overflow with derogatory remarks about Black people, Jews and activists from movements like Black Lives Matter and antifa. 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. To make their case, lawyers for the plaintiffs are trying to combine online evidence with a somewhat obscure law from the Civil War era. It has been postponed repeatedly because of the pandemic. Kessler after the lead plaintiff and the lead defendant, is expected to last at least four weeks and involve more than 65 plaintiffs, defendants and lawyers. 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 federal government has called the rise of domestic extremism a lethal threat to the United States. Since the rally in August 2017, extremist ideology has seeped from the online world and surfaced in other violence, ranging from street clashes between far-right groups and leftists in Portland, Ore., to the storming of the Michigan Statehouse, to the Jan. The long-delayed 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. Now, more than four years later, a civil trial starting on Monday in Charlottesville, Va., will revisit those unsettling events. The violent rally started with a mob of men brandishing burning torches in the heart of an American city while chanting racist, antisemitic slogans, and it ended with a woman murdered, scarring a nation.
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