See also: Narrative Collapse: Is Charlottesville’s James Alex Fields The Next George Zimmerman?
To say the rule of law is dead assumes a precise definition. It means criminal justice is guided by public opinion, ideology, and media pressure rather than any semblance of an objective process or written code. It’s to say that justice is arbitrary rather than blind, and that we live under the same kind of system the Revolution supposedly ended.
James Fields never had a chance. The Main Stream Media built up a narrative about 2017’s Unite The Right protest of Alt Right protesters randomly attacking peaceful crowds. Journalists used this foundational myth to justify the Left’s deplatforming and censorship of patriots on a massive scale. If Fields had been acquitted, or convicted of a lesser offense, the entire myth could have fallen apart. Thus, nothing was left to chance in this trial.
Imagine the following occurring in any other case:
Despite the fact that Charlottesville’s own government enabled violence on a mass scalesimply to shut down the Unite The Right rally and that the city has been in a political frenzy for more than a year, the judge refused to move the trial. [Update: Judge Declines To Move Fields’ Trial Out Of Charlottesville Court, NBC29, August 30, 2018] Attorney Charles Weber, a Republican initially assigned to defend Fields, was removed because Weber was also part of a lawsuit to prevent the Robert E. Lee statue from being removed from Charlottesville. [Former Albemare prosecutor Lunsford appointed to Fields case, by Dean Seal, The Daily Progress, August 16, 2017] Instead, Fields was represented by Democrat Denise Lunsford, whose lackluster defense and refusal to aggressively question witnesses astonished observers. When the defense did move for some charges to be dismissed, Judge Richard Moore declared in open court that “I don’t know what intent he could have had other than to kill people” . [Text messages, calls allowed as evidence in Fields trial, CBS19, December 5, 2018] Of course, determining intent was the whole point of the trial.
Each one of these is outrageous; together, it makes it hard to regard the trial as legitimate.
One shouldn’t overstate the case. It’s outlandish to say, “Fields did nothing wrong.” There’s almost no scenario where you can kill or hit someone with your car, accidentally or otherwise, and not have the law involved. Fields was accused in the past of attacking his mother and was clearly troubled. [Charlottesville car attack suspect James Fields previously accused of beating mother, by Dake Kang and Sarah Rankin, Global News, August 14, 2018] Negligent homicide, hardly a trivial offense, may well have been warranted, and this was enabled by Fields’s own poor decisions.
It’s incredible that Fields decided to drive anywhere near the crowd after that chaotic and violent morning. Of course, he may well have gotten lost—easy to do as Charlottesville and state police had teargassed Alt Right demonstrators but casually turned streets over to a Leftist mob during a supposed “state of emergency.” This mob, some armed with rifles, then reportedly shut down streets and even set up roadblocks.
Yet even the most unsympathetic or hostile interpretation of Fields’s actions is practically irrelevant. The entire trial seemed utterly disconnected from what occurred that day. It’s was akin to Camus’s novel The Stranger, where the defendant’s socially disturbing behavior leads to his conviction rather than anything germane.
One critical piece of evidence that supposedly “proved” murderous intent was a text Fields sent to his mother before the rally saying “we’re not the ones who need to be careful” after she urged him to be so. He also attached a picture of Hitler—idiotic and cringe-making, but not relevant, and no more extreme than the Communist flags carried proudly by the Antifa lionized by the MSM as heroes. It’s not as though Antifa were being quiet about their plans to start a war in Charlottesville. Indeed, violence was deemed inevitable if the two groups came into contact—making the actions of the Charlottesville police so utterly inexcusable.
Fields also made the mistake of expressing bitterness against Leftist protesters from jail, including against Heather Heyer’s mom—though these same “private” conversations show him protesting that he was being attacked. Again, this was interpreted as damning.
Another piece of “damning” evidence: a meme he posted ostensibly proving his “intent, motive and state of mind”—quite a lot for something distributed months before the rally. [Judge: Car crash meme admissible in Charlottesville murder trial, by Neal Augenstein, WTOP, November 30, 2018]
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