Several white supremacists have been tried and sentenced for violent acts in Charlottesville on August 12th, but no one has been charged with assaults that occurred the night before on the University of Virginia campus.
Now, a law professor and two of her students are asking the Commonwealth’s Attorney to prosecute those who carried burning torches across the school’s historic lawn.
When hundreds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched across the lawn at UVA many students, faculty and staff were terrified, among them 47-year-old Tyler Magill, who locked arms with counter-protesters around a statue of Thomas Jefferson.
“I knew I was going to die, or at the very least that I was going to get beaten so severely that I would have wished I was dead,” Magill remembers.
In fact, he wasn’t hurt that night, but two days later suffered a stroke. The white supremacists splashed other counter-protesters with lighter fluid and hurled their tiki-torches at them. Dean of Students Alan Groves was hit with a torch, drawing blood, and Law Professor Anne Coughlin says the Alt-Right demonstrators surrounded counter-protesters in a ring that was 6 to 8 people deep.
“On the video you can hear one of the leaders of the Alt-Right directing the torch-bearing marchers to fill-in gaps, so they deliberately encircled and penned them in in a way that was intimidating and frightening,” Coughlin says.
That’s important because Virginia has a law against using fire to intimidate. “The statute applies to someone who’s burning an object with the intent to intimidate other people and also doing so in a manner that creates in another person a reasonable fear of bodily injury.”
Coughlin urged students who felt threatened and those who were injured to come forward. “They were understandably wary. From their perspective the police stood by on the night of August 11 and watched them be attacked, so their response to me initially was, ‘We don’t think the police are interested in hearing from us.’”
Eventually some did make reports, but Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert Tracci has yet to file charges and refused our request for an interview.
Law student Adele Stichel is dismayed. “I understand that in general there are a lot of First Amendment concerns and that this is the kind of case that’s very difficult to prove, but the First Amendment is no longer there for you when you put people in reasonable fear of bodily harm and/or death,” Stichel says.
This is not just a University of Virginia matter. This is not just a Charlottesville or Albemarle County matter.
Stichel and Coughlin think the county, which has jurisdiction in this case, has a moral obligation to bring charges.
“We’ve struggled as a community in terms of how we deal with these people coming here and doing what they did, and the law offers us at least one answer," Stichel says.
Coughlin adds "they celebrated the fact that they got away with it, and some of them have gone on to commit violent acts in other places. This is not just a University of Virginia matter. This is not just a Charlottesville or Albemarle County matter. This is a matter that threatens the safety of people throughout the United States.”
And while there might not be enough evidence to charge everyone who carried a tiki torch, she thinks their leaders should face trial. “Those folks designed the torch-burning rally to be a violent event. To the extent we can identify them, and we have identified them, we at a minimum should proceed against those people.”
If Tracci fails to prosecute, Coughlin says this effort will still be worthwhile, documenting for history what happened in Charlottesville on August 11th.
