Court Orders White Nationalists to Pay $2 Million More for Charlottesville Violence Unite the Right

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Four years after violence erupted at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a jury has ordered white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay a combined $26 million in damages to individuals who suffered physical or emotional injuries consequently of the event.

Most of that cash — $24 million — was earmarked for punitive damages, but a judge later reduced that quantity to $350,000 — to be split amongst eight plaintiffs. On Monday, a federal appeals court reinstated greater than $2 million in punitive damages, finding that every plaintiff should receive $350,000, relatively than the $43,750 each would have received under a lower court ruling.

A 3-judge panel of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the jury’s decision to award $2 million in damages but said state law, which places a $350,000 limit on punitive damages, must be applied per person, not to all eight plaintiffs, as a lower court judge had ruled.

The ruling stems from a federal lawsuit against two dozen white nationalists and organizations that took part in two days of demonstrations in Charlottesville to protest the city’s plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

On the second day after the Unite the Right rally was declared an illegal assembly, James Alex Fields Jr., a white supremacist from Maumee, Ohio, intentionally drove his automobile right into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one woman and injuring dozens of others. Fields, who was one among the defendants in the civil case, is currently serving a life sentence for murder and hate crimes.

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A Fourth Circuit panel denied the defendants’ motion to have the court ask the Virginia Supreme Court to rule on the issue of whether each plaintiff could receive $350,000 in punitive damages, saying in its ruling that it found the language and history of the state law to be “sufficiently clear to predict how a Virginia superior court would rule.”

“More than two years ago, the jury used its $24 million punitive damages award to send an unmistakable message to defendants and the public about the outrageous misconduct that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia. While the law compels us to reduce the award, it is past time to send that message,” Chief Judge Albert Diaz wrote in the 3-0 ruling.

Lawyers representing the plaintiff said they were satisfied with the court’s ruling.

“Today’s decision restores more than $2 million in punitive damages from a jury verdict that sent a clear message against racist and anti-Semitic hatred and violence,” attorneys Robert Kaplan, David E. Mills and Gabrielle E. Tenzer, said in a press release.

Lawyers for the defendants didn’t immediately respond to emails in search of comment.

The verdict in the 2021 trial was a rebuke to the white nationalist movement and specifically to two dozen individuals and organizations accused in a federal trial of orchestrating violence against African Americans, Jews and others as a part of a rigorously planned conspiracy.