XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.misc, alt.politics.republicans
XPost: alt.politics.nationalism.white
From: d@ray
As the politicization of the American judicial system accelerates,
emboldened prosecutors are navigating into uncharted waters to please
wealthy donors, raise their national profile, and distract from the crime
epidemic they have helped unleash.
Following the Unite the Right rally in August 2017, Albemarle County’s
chief prosecutor Robert Tracci declined to bring charges under Virginia
Code Section 18.2-423.01-B against nationalist protestors who marched with
Tiki Torches at the University of Virginia, arguing that such cases would
be difficult to prove in light of the First Amendment issues involved.
The Virginia law, a class 6 felony, prohibits the burning of objects in a
public place with the intent of intimidating a person or group of persons.
Few criminal charges have been brought under this statute, and when they
have been applied, prosecutors have had mixed success. In Virginia v.
Black, a 2003 Supreme Court case dealing with the constitutionality of a
closely-related cross burning statute, the Court upheld the statute in
part, holding that given cross burnings’ “long and pernicious history as a
signal of impending violence” they could amount to “true threats” not
protected by the First Amendment. But the Court also struck down part of
the statute, holding that cross burning by itself, without additional
evidence of intent to intimidate, could not support a conviction.
This is the formidable Constitutional obstacle Tracci cited in his decision
not to pursue the Charlottesville marchers. But his prudent decision was
attacked by his opponent, Jim Hingeley, during the 2019 Albemarle County
Commonwealth Attorney race. Hingeley, who according to the Virginia Public
Access Project received donations from George Soros ($5,000) and local
activist billionaire Sonjia S. Smith ($114,000), was able to ride the
avalanche of money to a commanding 56% to 43.5% victory over Tracci.
Four years later, Hingeley has overseen an overhaul in Albemarle County’s
criminal justice system but the results have been problematic. In his first
year in office, the murder rate in Charlottesville increased 30% year over
year, according to data compiled by the Daily Progress. According to FBI
crime data, there were 0 murders in Charlottesville in 2021. In the last
seven months, however, the same city has suffered a surge of violence,
already counting 14 homicides. The public safety situation for UVA students
in Charlottesville has become so dire that university administrators are
now supporting a task force of local, state, and federal law enforcement
officials seeking to drastically increase police patrols around the campus
and more stringently deploy no-trespass orders against mostly black people
from areas around the school, according to a report last month in the
school’s paper, UVA Today.
Hingeley now finds himself on the defense against public discontent. But
rather than taking firmer steps to protect UVA students and Charlottesville
residents from violent crime, it seems he seeks to distract from his
experiment’s failure by pivoting to the tiki torch prosecutions.
In recent months, Hingeley’s office began expending scarce resources during
a crime wave by hunting down multiple Unite the Right protesters across the
country under the “burning objects” statute. Three men, Tyler Dykes, Dallas
Medina and Wil Zachary Smith, were surprised when five years after the
Charlottesville march, they were arrested on out-of-state charges and
transported to Virginia.
The men, all charged with the same crime, have so far been treated
differently depending on the judges they have drawn. In the case of Medina,
the judge allowed him to return to his home in Ohio until his next hearing
in June. Smith, from Texas, has been held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville
Regional jail without bond since January for a 2018 charge of pepper
spraying a member of Antifa during the tiki torch march. Last February, a
grand jury indicted him for the burning objects charge as well.
The most astonishing development has been Dykes’ experience. Dykes, of
South Carolina, is only 25 years old, but has become a successful small
business owner. During his bond hearing last week, the Assistant County
prosecutor argued for Dykes to be held without bail by presenting a blog
post from a group called “Atlanta Antifa” that purports to show evidence
that he is still involved in nationalist political activity unrelated to
the tiki torch case. Atlanta Antifa members are currently facing domestic
terrorism charges for their violent actions seeking to prevent the
construction of a police training facility in Dekalb County, Georgia, but
this did not dissuade the prosecutor from entering their highly
editorialized and largely irrelevant profile of Dykes as official evidence.
The judge, who is African-American, agreed with Dykes’ attorney that he was
not a flight risk, yet granted the prosecutor’s request to hold him in
custody until trial based on the opinion of an anonymous Antifa group on
the internet.
The race, political views, or media diet of a judge, prosecutor, or
defendant should not be allowed to play a role in the American criminal
justice system, yet both in Albemarle County and the nation at large, these
previously sacred rules that underpin the integrity of our justice system
have been casually brushed aside. For those who cross the ideologies of
wealthy campaign donors, freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate are
no longer civil liberties that can be taken for granted.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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