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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – A man who drove his car to counterpart manufacturing at a white nationalist rally in Virginia in 2017 was convicted of first degree murder, a verdict that local civil rights advocates will help heal a community marked by violence and racial tensions that it has inflamed throughout the country
A state jury rejected the defense arguments that James Alex Fields Jr. acted in self-defense at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017. He also sentenced Fields to eight other charges, including serious injury and assault,
Fields, 21, traveled to Virginia to Maumee, Ohio, Virginia, to support white nationalists. As a large group of counter-candidates were crossing Charlottesville singing and laughing, he stopped his car, backed off, and then spun in the crowd, according to the testimony and video surveillance shown to the jurors.
Prosecutors told the jury that Fields was angry. after witnessing violent clashes between the two parties earlier in the day. Violence prompted police to close rally even before official start
Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old civil rights and paralegal activist, was killed and nearly 30 wounded. The trial included emotional testimony from survivors who described devastating injuries and long, complicated recoveries.
After reading the verdict in court, some of the injured kissed Heyer's mother, Susan Bro. She left the courthouse without comment. Fields' mother, Samantha Bloom, disabled, left the courthouse in wheelchair without comment
A group of about a dozen local civil rights activists held in front of the palace justice after the verdict, arms raised.
"They will not replace us, they will not replace us!" They shouted, in response to the chants heard at the 2017 rally, when white nationalists shouted, "You will not replace us!" Our community is able to take a step closer to healing and to go "
Charlottesville civil rights activist, Tanesha Hudson, said she saw in the guilt verdict the way the city says," We will not tolerate that in our city.] "We do not represent this type of hatred. We simply do not, "she said.
White nationalist Richard Spencer, who was scheduled to speak at the Unite the Right rally, described the verdict as" denial of justice. "
"I'm unfortunately not shocked, but it shocks me," he told The Associated Press. He was treated from the start as a terrorist. "
Spencer had asked if Fields could benefit from a fair trial because the case was" so moved "…"
"There does not seem to be any reasonable evidence that Spencer popularized the term "alt right" to describe a marginal movement vaguely mixing white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and other extremist views of extremism, according to Spencer.
He stated that he did not feel himself personally responsible for the violence that had erupted in Charlottesville.
"Absolutely not," he said. "As a citizen, I'm not sure. have the right to protest. I have the right to speak. That's what I came to do in Charlottesville. "
The far right rally of August 2017 was organized in part to protest the plan to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.Hundreds of members of the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis and other white nationalists – emboldened by the election of President Donald Trump – headed to the university town to attend one of the largest gatherings of white supremacists of the decade.
After Trump's fiery tensions Even further when he said that "both sides" were to blame, a comment that some saw as a refusal to condemn racism.
According to one of his former professors Fields was known in high school for being fascinated by Nazism and idolizing Adolf Hitler and was shown to the jurors a text message sent to his mother a few days before the rally, which contained an image of the famous German dictator. mother had asked him to pay attention, he replied: "It is not us (sic) who must be careful. [19659002] In the months following his arrest, Fields made two recorded phone calls to his mother, but he told him that he had been harassed "by a group of violent terrorists" at the rally. In another case, Fields called the murdered woman's mother a "communist" and "one of those anti-white supremacists."
Prosecutors also showed jurors the same Field posted on Instagram three months before the rally in which bodies are shown being thrown in the air after a car struck a crowd of people identified as demonstrators. He issued the message in public on his Instagram page and sent a similar image as a private message to a friend in May 2017.
But Fields' lawyers told the jury that he had gone into the crowd on rally day, fearing for his life and was "scared "to death" by the previous violence of which he had been a witness. A video of Fields interviewed after the accident showed him sobbing and hyperventilating after learning that a woman had died and that other people had been seriously injured.
Wednesday, Bowie, hit by the Fields car, broke the pelvis and other injuries,
"This is the best I've been doing for a year and a half", said Bowie.
The jury will meet again on Monday to recommend a sentence. Under the law of Virginia, jurors can recommend a sentence ranging from 20 years to life imprisonment for a charge of first degree murder.
Fields is punishable by death if he is convicted of a separate federal hate crime charge. No lawsuit has been scheduled yet.
By Denise Lavoie, Associated Press
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