Posted on October 12, 2024

Torch-Toting Unite the Right Participant Convicted

Jason Armesto, Daily Progress, October 11, 2024

The goat’s blood-drinking White supremacist and failed Senate candidate who participated in the torch-lit march across University of Virginia Grounds before the infamous Unite the Right rally-turned-riot in 2017 was convicted Friday.

Augustus Sol Invictus was found guilty in Albemarle County court for violating a Virginia law that prohibits the use of fire to racially intimidate. He could face five years behind bars.

Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley, who made the prosecution of Invictus and his comrades a central plank in his campaign for election, called it a “historic moment.” Invictus’ conviction marks the first time a 2022 law designed to rid Virginia of the Ku Klux Klan, commonly referred to as the “cross-burning statute,” has secured a verdict in a jury trial.

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Invictus is the first torch-toting racist to be found guilty in a jury trial, but not the first Hingeley has successfully prosecuted using Virginia’s cross-burning statute. Five others have already pleaded guilty to felony charges and two to no-jail misdemeanors, with six months the typical sentencing.

The prosecution made it clear during the three-day trial that Invictus and his compatriots did not break the law by walking UVa Grounds or even chanting racist and Nazi-era slogans such as “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil.”

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Invictus and the mob crossed the line when they approached and surrounded 20 to 30 counterprotesters, many of them UVa students, at the base of a statue of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in front of the school’s iconic Rotunda.

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Among the counterprotesters was a young Black man, Devin Willis, then a UVa student, who testified on Wednesday that he feared he would be lynched.

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Invictus’ lawyer argued that his client’s actions constituted free speech protected by the First Amendment.

“If this conduct is condemned and punished, the First Amendment is in peril, and without the First Amendment, we have no country,” defense attorney Terrell Roberts III told the jury in closing arguments.

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In addition to disputing that Invictus had intent to intimidate, Roberts questioned the credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses, including Willis.

“Where was the evidence he saw rope or anything like that?” Roberts said. “No reasonable person would take this for a lynch mob.”

After a contention he introduced on Thursday, Roberts attempted to convince the jury that the counterprotesters were not “just a bunch of innocent students” but violent anti-fascists, or antifa, who instigated the conflict.

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One member of the jury told The Daily Progress that the prosecution had done “an excellent job” and said Invictus had hurt himself when he took the witness stand and mentioned civil war. The prosecution had argued Invictus and his comrades were in a violent mindset when they headed to Charlottesville to “play war.”

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