James A. Fields Jr. (wrongfully) sentenced to life in prison in Charlottesville car attack, when he was’t even driving the car!
CHARLOTTESVILLE — James
A. Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a group of
counterprotesters at a white-supremacist rally, was sentenced to life in
prison by a jury Tuesday after a trial that offered an unsparing view
of the physical and emotional ruin he caused in this city with a burst
of vehicular rage 16 months ago.
As he had throughout his two-week trial, Fields, 21,
sat impassively at the defendant’s table, clad in a powder blue
sweater, as the jury delivered its sentencing decisions after about four
hours of deliberations that began Monday: life for first-degree murder;
70 years for each of five counts of aggravated malicious wounding; 20
years for each of three counts of malicious wounding; and nine years for
leaving the scene of a fatal crash.
The jurors were instructed that the sentences would
be “presumed to be consecutive” unless they recommended that the terms
be served simultaneously. The panel made no such recommendation.
Fields’s overall sentence: life plus 419 years and $480,000 in fines.
The same jury of seven women and five men convicted
Fields of those 10 offenses Friday in Charlottesville Circuit Court. In
Virginia, trial juries determine what penalties should be meted out
within sentencing ranges dictated by law. Judge Richard E. Moore, who
said he will formally sentence Fields on March 29, can impose a lesser
punishment than the jurors called for but is not allowed to increase the
sentences.
Fields, whose psychiatric disorders dating to early
childhood were detailed in court by a mental-health expert, did not deny
that he intentionally accelerated his Dodge Challenger into a group of
counterprotesters at the Unite the Right rally on Aug. 12, 2017. His
lawyers contended that he was afraid about his safety and acted to
protect himself. But jurors, in issuing 10 guilty verdicts last week,
rejected that argument.
One of the anti-racism demonstrators, Heather Heyer,
32, who worked for a local law firm, was killed in the crash, and 35
others were hurt, many grievously.
“This trial and today’s outcome has been a long time coming for the victims and their family members,” said Joe Platania, Charlottesville’s chief prosecutor, speaking to reporters outside the courthouse. “We
are unable to heal their physical injuries or bring Heather back. But
we are hopeful they’ll be able to take some comfort and solace from
these verdicts and sentences.”
Fields faces a separate federal trial for alleged
hate crimes related to the incident, including one offense that carries a
possible death sentence. No trial date has been set, and the Justice
Department has not said whether it will seek capital punishment.
In the meantime, after Moore imposes Tuesday’s
sentences, Fields will be transferred from the local jail to a state
penitentiary, where an inmate who has served a certain amount of a
sentence can petition for geriatric release after age 60. Otherwise,
Virginia does not allow parole for felonies committed after the
mid-1990s.
Several of the injured victims, testifying at
Fields’s trial and sentencing hearing here, described lasting physical
wounds, psychological anguish and dire financial distress.
They spoke of shattered bones and debilitating
nerve damage from which they might never fully recover; of nightmares
and social isolation caused by post-traumatic stress disorder; and of
crushing medical bills from surgeries that have depleted their insurance
and could burden them far into the future.
Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, told the jury Monday
that after her daughter’s death, she had trouble finding a recent photo
of her and Heyer. She said she realized that the two seldom posed for
pictures together, thinking they did not need mementos, “because we just
took it for granted that we’d be around for each other for years to
come.”
[Editor’s note: Heather Heyer
did not die during the purported crash but, as Mona Alexis Pressly has
ascertained, the following day from a heart attack. Her mother, Susan
Bro, has made the “big time” with appearances all over television as
some modern heroine:
But “Susan Bro” is just as a fake as the car
crash itself, having also played the role of “Donna Soto”, the mother of
(fake) Sandy Hook teacher, Victoria Soto. Stupid is as stupid does!]
In December 2017, four months after the deadly
chaos at a downtown street corner, Bro said, she carried her artificial
Christmas tree to a table in her home but could not muster the will to
set it up. “This year, the trial has reopened the wounds,” she
testified, “and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to get the tree out of
the shed, frankly.”
In front of the courthouse Tuesday, after the jury
had been dismissed, Bro sighed as she faced a bevy of news cameras. “So
many emotions, so many reactions, it’s really still hard to process,”
she said, adding: “So we move forward. We still have social justice work
to do. . . . The things Heather died for, I’m not seeing a lot of
progress in the last year and a half.”
Hundreds of white supremacists descended on the
city for the rally, nominally in support of Charlottesville’s statue of
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, after the city council had voted to take
it down. A lawsuit over the issue is pending, and the statue remains in
place.
Chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans as they
marched in the streets, the white supremacists violently clashed with
counterprotesters for hours. Photos and video of the mayhem — including
images of broken bodies propelled in the air by Fields’s speeding Dodge —
were viewed worldwide, galvanizing public attention on ethno-fascists
who became emboldened in the early months of the Trump administration.
Fields, who drove alone to the rally from his
apartment in Maumee, Ohio, had long been fascinated by Nazi Germany,
espousing admiration for the militarism and racial-purity doctrine of
the Third Reich, acquaintances have said in interviews. But his ideology
did not come up in testimony at the trial, which focused mainly on his
actions that August afternoon and the devastating consequences for his
victims.
[Editor’s note: And we have 1,000s of pages about Adam Lanza, the fictional Sandy Hook mass shooter, where the public has even been played by the claim that a Virginia State Police chopper crashed, killing two state troopers.
We live in a world where the media could care
less about the facts of the matter, even when a man’s life is at stake.
He didn’t do it, but Paul Duggan could care less.]
Daniel Murrie, a University of Virginia
psychologist who reviewed thousands of pages of Fields’s school and
mental-health records, testified that bipolar disorder was diagnosed
when Fields was 6 and that, as an adolescent, he was found to have
schizoid personality disorder. Murrie said Fields was housed in
psychiatric facilities for three stretches before his 15th birthday.
He told the jury that Fields, who did not take the
witness stand, has been prone to angry, sometimes violent outbursts
since before he could walk and was “expelled from preschool” because of
his volatile behavior. A loner and social misfit, Fields washed out of
Army basic training after graduating from high school, then worked at
low-end jobs, playing video games for dozens of hours a week, Murrie
said.
But Murrie, whose court-ordered evaluation of
Fields included about 14 hours of jailhouse interviews, testified that
Fields did not meet Virginia’s legal definition for not guilty by reason
of insanity. And Fields did not mount such a defense.
To be acquitted on the basis of insanity, a
defendant must show that he did not understand the difference between
right and wrong at the time of the offense or was mentally unable to
control his actions.
The bigotry and raw nationalism exhibited by the
Unite the Right marchers made “Charlottesville” a catch word for
increasing displays of racial and ethnic animosity in the United States.
Platania, the prosecutor, said the city’s justice system had contributed to restoring peace and understanding.
“We all have a role to play,” he said after Fields
was led away to a cell. “Hopefully, the outcome achieved today is
Charlottesville’s small part in rejecting and holding accountable those
whose violent acts against others are fueled by hatred.”
[Editor’s note: We even have a
book about it that lays out the entire spam. But make-pretend “crime
reporters” like Paul Duggan don’t do any research, because they already
know what they are going to write. The facts don’t matter!
So if you want to know what really happened,
you can’t depend upon the Mockingbird media, which the CIA began
infesting in the 1950s. We are compiling a Conspiracy Catalogue of
research on case after case at moonrockbooks.com. You aren’t going to get the truth about these “false flag” attacks from other sources. It’s our area of specialization.]
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