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2024-06-08 Fifth Column
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Mistrial declared for torch wielder at at Charlottesville ‘white nationalist’ rally
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[IsraelTimes] Trial was the first test of a Virginian law, inspired by Klu Klux Klan cross burnings, that makes it a felony to burn something to intimidate and cause fear of injury or death.
A Virginia judge declared a mistrial after jurors deadlocked on charges against a man accused of using a flaming torch to intimidate counter protesters during a 2017 gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville.
The trial for Jacob Joseph Dix of Clarksville, Ohio, was the first test of a state law that makes it a felony to burn something to intimidate and cause fear of injury or death. After deliberating for about 12 hours over two days, jurors in Albemarle County Circuit Court announced Thursday that they were deadlocked. Judge H. Thomas Padrick declared a mistrial Thursday evening.
Indictments unsealed last year showed 11 people had been charged with intimidation by fire, but prosecutors have not said whether additional defendants were also charged. Five people have pleaded guilty to the charge. Dix was the first to go on trial.
Legislators passed the 2002 law after the state Supreme Court ruled that a cross-burning statute used to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members was unconstitutional.
The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years. On Tuesday, prosecutors showed the jury videos of 300 to 400 white nationalists marching through the campus of the University of Virginia, carrying torches, shouting Nazi slogans and surrounding a much smaller group of anti-racist counter protesters, an event that ended in chaos and fighting between the two groups.
Some of those so-called “white nationalists” were Black, and many were there to protest Antifa acting on the Progressive project to pull down historic statues to erase American history, protected by Progressive multibillionaire-funded Democratic Party politicians and Soros district attorneys, but all were tarred with the label of Nazi white nationalists. All of the Antifa cadres were just that… Dix’s lawyer, Peter Frazier, told the jury nothing Dix did the night of Aug. 11, 2017, was criminal, and that the chants he joined in, including, "You will not replace us!" were free speech protected by the First Amendment.
Henrico County Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor, who was appointed as a special prosecutor, said she intends to try the case again and will see if there is any other evidence to pursue.
"We appreciated the enormous amount of time that the jury took to consider this case of first impression," she said.
After the clash at the university, violence broke out the next day when a "Unite the Right" rally was planned.
That’s the one where the gun toters were from several chapters of Redneck Revolt/John Brown Gun Club — which calls itself Antifa’s militia wing — pretending to be white supremacists. In a just world, they would be the ones tried and fined. After police declared the gathering an unlawful assembly and the crowd began to disperse, James Alex Fields Jr., a white supremacist from Maumee, Ohio, intentionally rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring dozens. Fields is serving a life sentence for murder and hate crimes.
He is also in our archives as James A. Fields, diagnosed schizophrenic among other things, poor man. Hopefully he is getting the treatment he needs in prison. But Dix's lawyer, Peter Frazier, told the jury nothing Dix did the night of Aug. 11, 2017, was criminal, and that the chants he joined in, including "You will not replace us!" were free speech protected by the First Amendment.
"He didn't shake his torch or try to hit somebody with it," Frazier said.
"He is not guilty of any crimes," he said.
The two days of demonstrations were organized in part to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It was believed to be the largest gathering of white nationalists in a decade.
Henrico County Commonwealth's Attorney Shannon Taylor, the special prosecutor in the case, told the jury that under the 2002 law, it doesn't matter if Dix actually assaulted anyone during the march. What matters, she said, is that he was one of the people who carried a burning torch to intimidate the counter-protesters. "He chose to engage in behavior that gave people the fear of being harmed," she said.
Dix, 29, of Clarksville, Ohio, told The Daily Progress newspaper that he has changed during the last seven years.
"I’m kind of on trial for a past life," he told the newspaper during a court hearing in January.
One prospective juror, the sole Black person in the pool, said she once worked a part-time job with Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler; she was not selected.
At the center of it all is the 29-year-old Dix, a truck driver based in Clarksville, Ohio. While his lawyer has already persuaded the judge to ban the prosecution from labeling him and other march participants with pejoratives, such as Nazi or White supremacist, there’s an elephant in the room: the shirt Dix was wearing that night.
A photograph entered into evidence shows him wearing a shirt with the number 88 on its front; the number is a popular code in White supremacist and neo-Nazi
...adherents of a philosophy that was seen even at the time as pure evil, which makes them either consciously and purely evil, or attention-seeking ratbags. Pick one, or both....
circles for "Heil Hitler
 ...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days, sometimes every few hour if it's an election year, as a politician somebody doesn't like...
, as H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Henrico County Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor, who is standing in for local prosecutors after they were forced to recuse themselves from the case,
…because they were wholly owned by the Soros Foundation’s march through the nation’s prosecutors offices, so the question is whether Ms Taylor is , too… asked questions after one witness testified to seeing the shirt. The witness, Emily Gorcenski,
| …such a stereotype: transgender “woman”, math degree from RPI, Black Bloc activist, fond of countersuing, fled Charlottesville after being doxxed by unknown parties faking the on-line identity of rally organizer Jason Kessler, and has lived in Berlin ever since, from whence she bravely doxes those she identifies as icky rightwingers… |
said she saw no such logos.
Well known among trackers of racist gatherings, the data scientist Gorcenski now lives in Germany. On the night of the 2017 march, when still living in Charlottesville, she livestreamed video of the march. That footage was played in court Tuesday.
"This is 20 people standing against what is coming," she can be heard narrating while viewing a group of counterprotesters with arms locked around the base of the Jefferson statue in front of the university’s iconic Rotunda. She can be heard on the video railing not just against the torch-bearers but against the masses she had hoped would have joined her in opposition.
"Where the fuck are the rest of you?" she asks.
She turns the camera to her own face.
"We are penned in," she says in the video. "We are surrounded on all sides by hundreds of Nazis. We have no way out."
Another prosecutor previously said that the focus of the admittedly belated prosecutions, seven years after the alleged crimes took place, is on only those who surrounded counterprotesters the night of Aug. 11, 2017. Thus far, prosecutors have won five convictions with penalties ranging from roughly 40 days to a year behind bars, out of the statutory maximum of five years.
Dix’s defense attorney Peter Frazier, however, has alleged that the guilty pleas were secured by holding out-of-state defendants without bail. He has blasted the prosecution for targeting his client for his Aryan appearance, including a square jaw and neatly shorn blond hair. According to Frazier, Dix didn’t do any surrounding on the night in question, so prosecutor Taylor is steering the case toward other alleged misdeeds.
Gorcenski, for instance, testified that Dix shouted at her while carrying his torch.
"He called me a leftist piece of shit," said Gorcenski.
The prosecutor seemed to allude to Frazier’s prior statements in her opening statement.
"Don’t judge him on his appearance," she told the jurors. "We are asking you to judge him on his actions."
While the second witness was a little-known UVa police officer named Kasey Templeton, who didn’t join the investigation until January of 2023, better known was the third witness, Larry Sabato.
A renowned author and political pundit, Sabato is the founder and leader of UVa’s Center for Politics. He also resides on the Lawn.
Sabato said that in 2017 then-UVa President Teresa Sullivan asked him over dinner to be on the lookout for the Aug. 11 march.
"She asked me to be on the Lawn during the whole evening," said Sabato. "I was in shock that it was happening."
Sabato also testified to seeing a burn on the hand of then-Dean of Students Allen Groves. The court file shows that an attempt to subpoena Groves to testify failed because of an outdated address.
Many legal cases previously decided in the Charlottesville area against right-wing figures have resulted in dramatic decisions, most recently the 2021 decision in the Sines v. Kessler federal civil suit, a multi-million-dollar jury verdict against the Unite the Right rally organizers.
Is Frazier already eyeing the appeals process? He has challenged the legality, timing and location of the prosecution, and spoken of the First Amendment and his own philosophy in his opening statement.
"I don’t defend clients," he said. "I defend the Constitution."
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Posted by trailing wife 2024-06-08 00:00||
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Posted by NN2N1 2024-06-08 10:16||
2024-06-08 10:16||
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Posted by M. Murcek 2024-06-08 10:40||
2024-06-08 10:40||
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