After a four-hour hearing July 15 in the cramped room temporarily housing Charlottesville Circuit Court, a judge handed down the same sentence recommended by the jury that found James Alex Fields, Jr. guilty of murder and maiming last December: life plus 419 years in prison. Self-proclaimed Hitler fanboy Fields was convicted of killing Heather Heyer […]
Judge Rick Moore got one big issue out of the way in the two-years-long lawsuit against the city and City Council for its 2017 vote to remove statues of Confederate generals: The monuments of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are indeed war memorials under state code, which prohibits their removal. In court May […]
City blasts Police Civilian Review Board A couple days after C-VILLE opinion columnist Molly Conger wrote about the importance of the still-developing but much-scrutinized Police Civilian Review Board, the board found itself the subject of another controversy. The CRB has been working for nine months to create bylaws to establish a permanent board that will […]
Awkward moments: Fields trial edition When we crammed more than two weeks of trial proceedings into a 4,000-word story, some of the finer details didn’t make the cut. So we’d like to take this opportunity to share a few of the not-so-fun facts of the James Alex Fields, Jr. trial, in which he [...]
It’s in the jury’s hands now. The prosecution and defense have given their closing arguments on the ninth day of James Alex Fields Jr.’s first-degree murder trial. The man charged with killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others when he rammed his car into a crowd at an August 12, 2017, [...]
It took three long days to seat a jury of 12 with four alternates. After all, it’s a national story and the video and photographs of a Dodge Challenger plowing into a group of counterprotesters have been viewed over and over. The defense does not dispute that James Alex Fields Jr., 21, [...]
At the first felony sentencing from last year’s violent Unite the Right rally, a judge on August 21 ordered a Maryland Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan leader to serve four years in prison for firing a gun at flamethrower-wielding Corey Long after an unlawful assembly had [...]
Baltimore’s imperial wizard of the Confederate White Knights of the KKK did not appear in court wearing his shiny Klan robes. He didn’t wear the prison stripes from previous appearances, nor did he wear the bandana and tactical vest he sported August 12 when he was videoed firing a Ruger SR9 [...]
In the second trial of the week for the brutal August 12 attack on DeAndre Harris, a jury deliberated 35 minutes before entering a second guilty verdict May 3 for an out-of-towner here for the Unite the Right rally. Georgia resident Alex Michael Ramos, 34, sat expressionless [...]
So far, Judge Rick Moore has accumulated six files pertaining to the lawsuit filed a year ago against Charlottesville and its city councilors for voting to remove the statue of General Robert E. Lee—and that doesn’t include the transcripts, he told lawyers in Charlottesville Circuit [...]
It was his word versus hers, and in a two-day trial, a jury believed him. In the case where ex-Charlottesville Police Department officer Christopher Seymore was charged with forcibly sodomizing Ronna Gary—twice—in her Shamrock Road home, a jury deliberated four-and-a-half hours and found [...]
Judge Rick Moore slightly shook his head as he watched a video that showed Alex Michael Ramos assaulting Deandre Harris in the Market Street Garage August 12—and then he denied an appeal to release Ramos on bond, despite an associate of Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler offering to house [...]
The battle over Charlottesville City Council’s vote to remove the statue of General Robert E. Lee continued in a packed courtroom September 1, with the lines pretty clearly drawn between statue supporters and those who want Lee to make a final retreat. The hearing was to argue the city’s [...]