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Friday, December 7, 2018
After roughly four hours of deliberation spread across Monday and Tuesday, a Virginia jury recommended sentencing Ohio man James Fields, 21, to life in prison plus 419 years plus US$480,000 in fines, after convicting him on December 7 of first-degree murder, several counts of malicious wounding, and one count of leaving an accident for driving his car into a crowd of anti-fascist counter-protesters during the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Judge Richard Moore is scheduled to decide whether to act on this recommendation at another hearing on March 29.
According to Associated Press, the 419 years figure summed five counts of malicious wounding at 70 years each, three more at 20 years each, and one leaving the scene of an accident at nine years.
Fields’s lawyers argued self-defense, that he was in fear for his own safety when he drove into the crowd, and they arranged for a psychologist to testify he had been diagnosed with bipolar and schizoid personality disorders as a youngster. Prosecutors said he drove his car into the crowd out of hate.
There is video of Fields’s Dodge Challenger hitting the counter-protesters, some of whom were thrown into the air by the impact. 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and 35 were injured. One video played in court showed Fields’s car backing up before ramming into the crowd, which the prosecutors claimed shows Fields’s intent. Victims and other eyewitnesses testified to what they had seen that day. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, also spoke.
Prosecutors pointed out that months before the events in Charlottesville, Fields had tweeted a picture of a car plowing into a crowd of people marked “protestors” and had sent his mother a text with the picture of Adolf Hitler.
Fields is also separately charged with a hate crime, which will be addressed through U.S. federal courts. A death sentence on this charge is legally possible.
The Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest was in response to the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who fought for the proslavery side of the American Civil War. The rally was heavily attended by white nationalists, white supremacists and other fascists. The people struck by Fields’s car were counter-protesters, not white nationalists.
Under United States law, a person convicted of multiple crimes can be given distinct sentences for each one, and they can serve out those sentences either at the same time or one after the other. Having other prison terms in addition to a life sentence often affects when a prisoner is eligible for parole, and it also establishes that even if one of the charges against Fields were overturned, he would still be expected to remain in prison for the others. According to University of California law professor Franklin Zimring, judges also hand down sentences in excess of a hundred years to symbolically denounce the convict. He notes this symbolic act can be affected by how much media coverage a case has received.