The trial of the goat’s blood-drinking White supremacist and failed Florida Senate candidate Augustus Sol Invictus got underway Wednesday.
The proceedings included emotional testimony from a young Black man who said he feared he’d be “strung up” the night of Aug. 11, 2017, as Invictus and hundreds of other White supremacists marched across the University of Virginia Grounds carrying lit torches.
There were also early signs of how Invictus and his counsel intend to defend against the intimidation charges he faces, leaning heavily on his First Amendment rights under the Constitution.
“This is one of the most important cases you’re ever going to come across,” defense lawyer Terrell Roberts III told the jury, “because the rights are so important to our country and to you.”
The case has drawn widespread attention for a variety of reasons, including the march’s proximity to the following day’s planned Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville protesting the city’s removal of its Confederate monuments. The rally was aborted and devolved into rioting and violence on the streets of the city, leading to the death of anti-racist counterprotester Heather Heyer at the hands of self-avowed neo-Nazi James Fields Jr.
Albemarle County prosecutors made their case Wednesday with four witnesses, but in his opening argument Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Lawton Tufts indicated that he had more than just people to testify.
“The videos in this case are the star witness,” said Tufts. “The defendant filmed the whole thing.”
Tufts encouraged the jury, consisting of seven men and seven women, two of whom will be discharged before deliberating, to pay close attention to the videos.
“Listen to the tone of their voices,” said Tufts, adding that there were sensations the jurors might need to envision.
“The smell of the burning fuel,” he said. “The heat of hundreds of burning flames.”
The jury heard from Devin Willis. On the night of Aug. 11, 2017, he was a rising second-year student at UVa and secretary of the university’s Black Student Alliance enjoying a spaghetti dinner at a professor’s house when he got word of the impending march.
“It wasn’t 30 guys,” he testified. “It was like 300 guys.”
He said he was among a group of about 20 counterprotesters who held a banner at the base of a statue of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and yelled at the White nationalists who surrounded them.
“It was literally like every racial nightmare, like the Klan,” he said. “They got very close — two or three arm’s lengths away.”
The prosecutor asked when he began to feel fear.
“The moment I saw how many of them there were,” he answered. “And the torches, I thought of lynching.”
During a hearing outside of the jury’s ears, the defense attorney argued that the commonwealth’s case should be struck because the counterprotesters were not trapped and because their fear was too generalized to pass constitutional muster.
“Did you hear Mr. Willis’ testimony?” asked Judge Richard E. Moore. “I thought he was an excellent witness. He thought he might die that night.”
Moore told the defense that what prevented him from striking the case was the encirclement of the counterprotesters.
“I would agree with your First Amendment argument up to that point,” said Moore. “I do think it’s a jury case.”
Other witnesses testifying Wednesday were UVa police investigator Casey Acord, who explained some of the videos on display, and former UVa law student Elizabeth Sines, the lead plaintiff in Sines v. Kessler, a federal civil lawsuit that convinced a jury in late 2021 that the Unite the Right’s organizers conspired to commit racially motivated violence and owed millions of dollars in damages.
In court Wednesday, Sines, now a Baltimore lawyer, played her own video and told the jury that she saw acts of violence against the counterprotesters.
“The Nazis would grab them one by one,” Sines said, “punching, kicking, hitting.”
The commonwealth’s expert witness was Michelle Kahn, a University of Richmond history professor who asserted that “Blood and soil” — one of the phrases the marchers chanted that night — originated in Nazi Germany and emphasizes the White race’s entitlement to the German fatherland.
Kahn also contended that “You will not replace us,” another chant uttered that night, harkens back to the Nazis’ fear of White genocide. What Kahn was not allowed to argue was what the torches, if anything, represented.
“Torches,” the judge said when the jury wasn’t in the courtroom, “have been used in a gazillion mass demonstrations.”
“As long as we can argue that on closing,” urged Tufts.
“And they,” replied the judge, nodding toward the defense, “can argue that it doesn’t mean anything.”
Invictus, a one-time U.S. Senate candidate who made headlines for denying the Holocaust and admitting to drinking goat’s blood as part of a ritual, faces up to five years behind bars for his involvement in the 2017 march.
Dressed in a beige corduroy sport coat over a light blue button-down shirt and maroon necktie, the ardent Catholic genuflected just before the jury entered. Later, he fanned himself, and the judge asked if the temperature was too high.
“It was a mistake to wear corduroy today,” replied Invictus. “My fault.”
Much of Wednesday involved sidebars during which Invictus’ lawyer argued that free speech would trump Virginia’s law against using fire to intimidate. He argued that there was no “true threat” as the U.S. Supreme Court decreed in its 2003 review of Virginia’s law, often referred to as the “cross-burning statute” as it was designed to drive the Ku Klux Klan out of the commonwealth.
“This case is not about speech,” Tufts told the jury. “You should not and you cannot punish this man for his expression, but you can and should punish him for breaking the law.”
Already, eight other men charged for their participation in the 2017 march have pleaded guilty, but the only person to challenge the case before a jury won a dismissal in August after jurors deadlocked in June.
The Invictus case resumed Wednesday with Invictus’ defense, closing arguments and, time permitting, jury deliberations.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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