July 19 was a grim day for three young men from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) who were told their punishment by a federal district judge in Charlottesville, Va. The defendants had been arrested under the Anti-Riot Act, which a California federal court has found unconstitutional, and charged for their participation in the 2018 “riots” in Charlottesville and California.
Denied bail, the RAM defendants, after many months in difficult conditions in prison, had entered into plea agreements in May 2019. A few weeks prior to the sentencing hearing and long after the plea agreements were entered into, the government announced its intention to try to increase, by means of the federal Hate Crime Enhancement Statute (part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2800003), the sentences to which the RAM defendants agreed in their plea agreements. The hate crime enhancement statute allows a court to increase a defendant’s prison time if the court determines that the defendant, in committing a federal crime, e.g., rioting, singled out members of a protected group, such as racial minorities, women, or homosexual persons.
At the hearing, the government put forward a massive effort to make its proposed hate crime enhancements stick. It called two FBI agents as witnesses and introduced and discussed over 60 exhibits, mostly photographs and videos, and invoked comparisons to Nazi Germany. ...
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