Wall Street Journal: Charlottesville Trial Aims to Show ‘Unite the Right’ Organizers Planned Violence
By: Integrity First For America News Coverage
By Deanna Paul, The Wall Street Journal. Read the full article here.
More than four years after a rally of white supremacists at the University of Virginia turned deadly, two dozen of the demonstrations’ leaders and groups are slated to go on trial in federal court in a lawsuit alleging they conspired to incite violence.
Filed by 10 people who were injured during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally and torchlight march in Charlottesville, Va., the suit uses a Reconstruction Era law in an attempt to hold the defendants liable for an alleged conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday in a federal courthouse in Charlottesville.
The assembly in Charlottesville was one of the largest gatherings of far-right activists in recent years, sparked by an effort to stop the removal of a Confederate statue from a city park. Hundreds of members of white nationalist, neo-Nazi and militia groups from around the nation joined the rally.
Throughout the weekend, violent clashes with counterprotesters left dozens injured and one woman dead, after a white nationalist demonstrator drove his car into a crowd.
The plaintiffs say their case will show that a range of far-right leaders and organizations spent months carefully coordinating the events on the internet and in person, and planned for them to turn violent.