After judge slashed punitive damages from $24m to $350,000, white nationalists ordered to pay over $2m for Unite the Right rally. Seven years after deadly violence erupted during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a federal appeals court has reinstated more than $2m in punitive damages for white nationalist leaders and organizations implicated in physical or emotional injuries suffered by people at the event. The decision brought the total that a jury ordered to be paid to more than $26m. Most of that money, $24m, was for punitive damages, but a judge later slashed that amount to $350,000 – to be shared by eight plaintiffs. On Monday, the Richmond-based fourth US circuit court of appeals restored more than $2m in punitive damages, finding that each of the plaintiffs should receive $350,000, instead of the $43,750 each would have received under the lower court’s ruling. A three-judge panel at the fourth circuit affirmed the jury’s award of $2m in compensatory damages – but it found that a state law that imposes the $350,000 cap on punitive damages should be applied per person instead of for 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 participated in two days of demonstrations in Charlottesville to protest against the city’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee. On the second day, after the Unite the Right rally had been declared an unlawful assembly, James Alex Fields Jr, a white supremacist from Maumee, Ohio, intentionally drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring dozens more.
via guardian: US white supremacists ordered to pay millions more for deadly 2017 rally
By Brennan Gilmore – This file has been extracted from another file, Public Domain, Link
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