You are here: Home / News / Fields Jury Will See Instagram Posts About Using a Car as a Weapon

Fields Jury Will See Instagram Posts About Using a Car as a Weapon

Published by lloyd on November 29, 2018
Today it was announced that Judge Richard Moore is going to allow the prosecution to introduce Instagram posts made by James Fields in May, 2017, in which he apparently reposted a meme that involved an image of a car plowing into a group of protesters. The Commonwealth argued that it showed premeditation — that he ran into the crowd on Fourth Street not because he was scared, but because he had bought into the right-wing “drive your car into a crowd” theme.
 
For a couple of years, right-wingers had been responding to leftist protests in the streets with the theme of “Run Them Over.” It was specifically an anti-Black Lives Matter and anti-racial justice protest catchphrase, and during 2017 it was showing up in memes and comments across the Internet.
 
In this article right after August 12,   Slate’s Henry Grabar lists just some of the places where anti-BLM actors — many of them law enforcement officers — were advocating vehicular homicide. In late January 2017, Fox Nation, the opinion website operated by Fox News, had tweeted out a short video called “Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protestors Trying To Block The Road.”
 
The video shows 90 seconds of different cars pushing and smashing their way through protesters, sometimes appearing to leave injured people in their wake. The theme music is an acoustic version of Ludacris’s “Move Bitch Get Out Da Way.”
 
The video piece originally appeared on the Daily Caller, and its author called it “a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the way by cars and trucks” and recommended viewers to “Study the technique; it may prove useful in the next four years.” After August 12, Fox Nation took down the video, though there is some evidence remaining of it having once been there.
 
Also during the spring and summer of 2017, there was a popular theme on alt-right Internet sites suggesting that there were actually laws protecting your right to run down protesters in the street. In North Dakota, Keith Kempenich, a state legislator who was angry because his mother-in-law was held up in traffic by an anti-pipeline protest, introduced a bill that would have given immunity to anyone who unintentionally hits a protester in the street. It failed, narrowly. The North Carolina House approved a similar bill in April, 2017, after protesters blocked streets in Charlotte after Keith Lamont Scott was killed by a Charlotte police officer, that would give even more leeway to drivers, though it did not pass the North Carolina Senate Similar laws were proposed in Texas, Tennessee and Florida. None of them passed, but among the folks coming to Charlottesville were some people who thought that it was now the law that you could run down protesters in your car and face no consequences.
 
Obviously, this line of evidence is going to be relevant to show James Fields’ state of mind. Did he drive the car into the crowd out of fear? Was it an impulse? Was it premeditated?

Under Virginia law, premeditation — a specific intent to kill or do great bodily harm — doesn’t have to exist for any set period of time. It may only exist for a split second. If that split-second thought is acted on, the death is first-degree murder. If there was no such specific thought, the death may be only second-degree murder. If he was acting out of fear, however misplaced, that denies the existence of “malice,” and the death is no more than manslaughter and the woundings become unlawful woundings and not malicious woundings. It is unlikely here that James Fields’ mental state would ever provide a complete defense, but that mental state could mean the difference between a life sentence and some combination of sentences that would allow Fields to get out of jail some day.

Posted in , Tagged