The goat’s blood-drinking White supremacist and failed Senate candidate who participated in the torch-lit march across University of Virginia Grounds before the infamous Unite the Right rally-turned-riot in 2017 was convicted Friday.
Augustus Sol Invictus was found guilty in Albemarle County court for violating a Virginia law that prohibits the use of fire to racially intimidate. He could face five years behind bars.
Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley, who made the prosecution of Invictus and his comrades a central plank in his campaign for election, called it a “historic moment." Invictus’ conviction marks the first time a 2002 law designed to rid Virginia of the Ku Klux Klan, commonly referred to as the "cross-burning statute," has secured a verdict in a jury trial.
“I especially want to recognize the court has in many rulings established this is a legitimate prosecution and has put to rest the many claims people have made over the years that a torch isn’t a burning object and conduct in this case is protected by the First Amendment,” Hingeley told The Daily Progress outside the Albemarle County Courthouse Friday. “Those contentions have been definitively overruled.”
Invictus, a 41-year-old Florida resident was one of hundreds of White supremacists who wielded torches while marching across UVa Grounds on Aug. 11, 2017, a day before the aborted Unite the Right rally protesting Charlottesville’s decision to remove its Confederate monuments. The rally was called off after the White supremacists came to blows with counterprotesters in the city streets, leading to the death of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer at the hands of self-avowed neo-Nazi James Fields Jr.
Invictus is the first torch-toting racist to be found guilty in a jury trial, but not the first Hingeley has successfully prosecuted using Virginia’s cross-burning statute. Five others have already pleaded guilty to felony charges and two to no-jail misdemeanors, with six months the typical sentencing.
The prosecution made it clear during the three-day trial that Invictus and his compatriots did not break the law by walking UVa Grounds or even chanting racist and Nazi-era slogans such as "Jews will not replace us" and "Blood and soil."
“It’s not illegal to march in a procession with lit torches, chanting even,” assistant prosecutor Armin Zijerdi told the jury.
Invictus and the mob crossed the line when they approached and surrounded 20 to 30 counterprotesters, many of them UVa students, at the base of a statue of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in front of the school’s iconic Rotunda.
“When that torch-lit procession bounds toward them and completely encircles them, that’s the moment,” said Zijerdi.
Among the counterprotesters was a young Black man, Devin Willis, then a UVa student, who testified on Wednesday that he feared he would be lynched.
“It was literally like every racial nightmare, like the Klan,” Willis said. “They got very close — two or three arm’s lengths away.”
Invictus’ lawyer argued that his client’s actions constituted free speech protected by the First Amendment.
“If this conduct is condemned and punished, the First Amendment is in peril, and without the First Amendment, we have no country,” defense attorney Terrell Roberts III told the jury in closing arguments.
He also contended that because a torch burns oil it is not itself a burning object. The Virginia law states that a person is guilty of the Class 6 felony if they burn an object “to place another person in reasonable fear or apprehension of death or bodily injury.”
In addition to disputing that Invictus had intent to intimidate, Roberts questioned the credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses, including Willis.
“Where was the evidence he saw rope or anything like that?” Roberts said. “No reasonable person would take this for a lynch mob.”
After a contention he introduced on Thursday, Roberts attempted to convince the jury that the counterprotesters were not “just a bunch of innocent students” but violent anti-fascists, or antifa, who instigated the conflict.
To make his point, Roberts appeared to compare the 2017 march to the 1965 march of Civil Rights protesters, who attempted to cross Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and were attacked by state troopers.
“Think about the ’60s when people were crossing that bridge in Birmingham. Their march was disrupted, wasn’t it?” Roberts told the jury. “Now jump to 2017. Their march was disrupted. Antifa was there. They were there to stir trouble.”
The jury was ultimately unpersuaded. After five hours of deliberations, and a pizza lunch, the jury reached a verdict just after 4 p.m. Friday.
One member of the jury told The Daily Progress that the prosecution had done “an excellent job” and said Invictus had hurt himself when he took the witness stand and mentioned civil war. The prosecution had argued Invictus and his comrades were in a violent mindset when they headed to Charlottesville to “play war.”
“He’s not a bad man. I think he’s a sad man. He’s unhappy with his life so he wants to go out and play war,” said lead prosecutor Lawton Tufts.
The jury member commended their peers, calling them “the most thoughtful people I’ve ever been around" and saying they carefully followed the jury instructions.
“It wasn’t a freedom of speech case. They had the right to march. But once they circled those people standing in front of our monument to Thomas Jefferson, then they lost that right,” said the juror.
Aug. 11, 2017, was itself a historic moment, said Hingeley. “And this verdict is also a historical moment."
Virginia’s cross-burning statue carries a maximum punishment of five years behind bars. Invictus’ sentencing hearing is scheduled for Jan. 8.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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