Daily Beast: ‘Unite the Right’ Trial Ends With White Supremacists Paying Millions for Violence
By: Integrity First For America News CoverageBy Kelly Weill, Daily Beast. Read the full article here.
A Charlottesville, Virginia, jury on Tuesday ruled that white supremacists engaged in a conspiracy and were responsible for attacks at the Unite the Right rally in 2017.
The decision was a costly one for prominent racists like Richard Spencer, Christopher Cantwell, and Jason Kessler, forcing them to pay millions to their victims. The jury did not reach a decision on two of the case’s largest claims, which argued that the defendants participated in a conspiracy to commit racial violence that violated federal law.
The ruling followed 22 days of tense testimony and deliberation over Unite the Right, the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. In their lawsuit Sines v. Kessler, nine victims of Unite the Right filed suit against the rally’s key participants, accusing them of deliberately creating the conditions for a violent, racist event. The defendants, a coalition of 24 far-right groups and individuals, denied those claims in court. Although defendants frequently embraced racist rhetoric on the witness stand, they argued that they had not actively conspired to cause violence at the two-day event, at which white supremacists attacked counter-demonstrators with fists, tiki-torches, and a car.