Wow, now we have truly entered Bizarro World where the planet is cube shaped, up is down, left is right, and people like 20 year-old teacher’s assistant Deandre Harris — who has no previous criminal record — who have been attacked and viciously beaten bloody and his leg broken by violent white supremacists are the ones who get arrested, while the police officers actually investigating the case are completely bypassed.
Local legal experts, as well as the Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office, say that process played out rather unusually in the arrest of 20-year-old DeAndre Harris.
“I’m perplexed,” said Josh Bowers, a criminal law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, noting that in most jurisdictions only police have the power to initiate the arrest process.
Bowers said this manner of legal recourse reminded him of the pre-Revolutionary War justice system, much of which was carried out by private individuals. He said the statute makes it easy for a person to use “the authority of the state to settle scores or promote private biases,” as exemplified in the case against Harris.
A magistrate issued a warrant for “unlawful wounding” against Harris on Monday at the request of a man Harris’ attorney identified as Harold Ray Crews, an attorney who chairs the neo-Confederate League of the South’s North Carolina chapter. Harris turned himself in to Charlottesville Police on Thursday and was released on bond.
So exactly how did this nonsense happen? Join me over the flip.
Apparently there is an old law in Virginia which allows someone to make a complaint with a Magistrate rather than the police, and that Magistrate can issue a warrant without the police investigating or the involvement of the DA. Yep. really.
Lloyd Snook, a Charlottesville-based criminal defense attorney, said that the Commonwealth Attorney’s office is “typically” asked to approve warrants. But that doesn’t appear to have happened in this case.
“We did not have anything to do with it,” a spokeswoman for the Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office told TPM in a Thursday phone call, drawing out the pauses between each word. “And we’re after the fact like ‘Hey!’”
Charlottesville police have acknowledged that one of their detectives responded to and “verified the facts” of the complaint filed against Harris, allowing a magistrate to issue the warrant. But that officer apparently was not Det. Sgt. Jake Via, who’s been overseeing the investigation into the parking garage incident.
“We were not expecting this,” Via told the Washington Post earlier this week. “We were expecting to do our own investigation into the man’s allegations.”
Yeah, that would be something wouldn't it? Have an investigation, talk to witnesses, gather evidence, determine the facts and then issue arrest warrants and force people to retain an attorney and pay for their bond?
The core of issue seems to be “evidence” from white supremacists that shows Harris before he was beaten swinging a flashlight at Harold Ray Crews who at the same moment was attempting to impale someone with his Confederate Flag. Here’s a sample clip.
Seconds after this Harris was swarmed by six or more supremacists who beat him bloody as we’ve all seen, but the claim made by this video that the supremacist — shown in the foreground — was a “peaceful, law abiding marcher” is simply beyond belief. He’s in the process of attacking someone, and they’re struggling against being stabbed. If an investigation had been done, and these witnesses — including the person who is on the verge of being impaled — were questioned I doubt they would have argued that Harris was the aggressor.
Or perhaps you might have the chance to allow additional evidence which has been put forward by Harris’ attorney S. Lee Merritt, who has pointed out to the WaPo that Crews wounds may be the result of another altercation with three white people — possibly Antifa members — who Merritt claims punched him several times in the head less than a minute after the attack on Harris.
Harris’s attorney, S. Lee Merritt, denounced the charge and said it was orchestrated by the League of the South, an organization labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Crews, who runs the group’s North Carolina chapter, was not injured “in any way” by Harris, Merritt said.
“We find it highly offensive and upsetting,” Merritt said, “but what’s more jarring is that he’s been charged with the same crime as the men who attacked him.”
Please note that people in this second video use their flag as weapons to pummel those who had grabbed and punched the old man.
There also appears to be the fact that these appear to be two entirely different people. As these screen grabs show the person hit by Harris was wearing a cap, over short white hair and was carrying a Confederate flag.
The person who has been identified as Crews by Mr. Merritt has white hair, a long beard, no hat, was wearing a backpack and was carrying a different black and white supremacist flag.
Just to add more confusion to the situation, it might be that neither of these me are Harold Ray Crews because that happens to be this guy who doesn’t have a long white beard or white hair at all.
Crews, a 48-year-old North Carolina real estate lawyer who describes himself as a “Southern Nationalist” on his Twitter bio, did not respond to TPM’s email and phone calls requesting comment. But the League of the South posted several items celebrating the pending arrest of the “young negro male” involved with “harassing their members” in the parking garage.
Crews has deep ties to the League, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has reported that he runs their Facebook, website and a related YouTube channel that’s posted under his own name.
The League of the South displays an injury photo Crews that looks like this:
So we have a bit of a conundrum, if police had first been allowed to fully investigate they might have found that these are possibly three different people and the charges agains Harris are completely bogus, or they might have found something else entirely.
Let’s say just for the sake of discussion that Crews is the one who fought with Harris while wearing a white cap, how exactly he explain what he was doing with the flag just then? Did he even bring it up to the Magistrate — perhaps make a false statement to the court — or did he claim that they were trying to take it from him? If so, doing it pointed end first would seem a rather self-defeating strategy.
All of that’s in addition to the fact that before the rally members of the alt-Right specifically discussed and planned how they would attack and wound counter protestors.
A steady stream of leaked screenshots from the now-defunct chat server used to organize attendees at this month’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally shows that the white nationalists who descended on Charlottesville, Virginia were well-organized and came with the intention of committing brutal violence.
...
In some of the chats, posters shared photographs of themselves mugging with semi-automatic weapons or homemade shields. In others, they discussed the ideal thickness of PVC pipes that could be used for “thumping” counter-protesters and shared GoFundMe links urging like-minded people to fund their road trips to Charlottesville.
Most strikingly, a number of posts joked about plowing cars into crowds of peaceful protesters. James Alex Fields, Jr. allegedly killed one such counter-protester, Virginia native Heather Heyer, and injured at least 19 others when he rammed his Dodge Charger down a crowded street at the height of the rally.
Evidence such as this could and should be utilized to show that Crews actions were likely planned and premeditated, while Harris was acting in self-defense only to be beaten to within an inch of his life as a result. Deliberately putting him through yet another trauma and that hands to the people who attacked and brutalized him the first time is a tragedy and injustice.
Also Deandre’s friend Corey Long appeared on CNN to talk about this situation and revealed that the Charlottesville PD have also issued an warrant for his arrest as well, for which he surrendered himself this morning because he used a lit paint can to defend himself and another elderly man from a set of supremacists one of whom fired a pistol at him.
“At first it was peaceful protest,” Long said softly as he spoke. “Until someone pointed a gun at my head. Then the same person pointed it at my foot and shot the ground.”
Long said the only weapon he had was a can of spray paint that a white supremacist threw at him earlier, so he took a lighter to the spray paint and turned it into a flame thrower. And a photographer snapped the photo.
But inside every photograph is an untold story. If you look closely at Long’s picture, there’s an elderly white man standing in between Long and his friend. The unknown man was part of the counterprotests, too, but was afraid, and Long and his friends were trying to protect him. Even though, Long says, those who were paid to protect the residents of Charlottesville were doing just the opposite.
“The cops were protecting the Nazis, instead of the people who live in the city,” Long said. “The cops basically just stood in their line and looked at the chaos. The cops were not protecting the people of Charlottesville. They were protecting the outsiders.”
There’s another word for the courts ignore criminals and then criminalize those whom they’ve threatened and attacked: It’s known as white privilege.
Sunday, Oct 15, 2017 · 7:42:51 AM +00:00
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Frank Vyan Walton
Young Turks also addressed this incident and seemed to have resolved the issue I pointed out with the guy with the backpack. Just before that person is attacked, another white nationalist — who may indeed be Crews — is hit with a pipe and falls. This occurs a few minutes after the attack on Deandre and they show this video multiple times with a red circle around Crews as he’s hit and goes down.
Thursday, Nov 9, 2017 · 8:48:45 PM +00:00
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Frank Vyan Walton
Reviewing the tape further it appears that on the video shown by Mr. Merritt the person who appeared to be identified as Cruz actually goes down at 00:11 in the video before the older Supremacist with the black and white flag is attacked — who in this screen shot is behind the guy in the light blue shirt, and Cruz shown by the red arrow is on the ground already behind him.
At this point in time Deandre Harris had already been attacked and was on his way to treatment, he had nothing to do with this.