The Charlottesville Car attack is a terrorism attack
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| The Charlottesville Car attack |
Mr. Sessions said “The violence and deaths in Charlottesville strike at the heart of American law and justice. When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.”
James Alex Fields Jr., 20, is facing a second-degree murder in The Charlottesville car attack that killed Heather D. Heyer, 32, and injured at least 19 other people who were protesting.
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| The Charlottesville Car attack |
Will Mr. Sessions seek to make it a federal case ? Is this considered a hate crime? Is it compared to London attack ? What if the attacker was a Muslim or a refugee?
Experts says it's not necessarily because a crime was motivated by hate does not mean it is covered by the federal hate crimes law. Only some types of hatred count. If the attack was because of certain characteristics, For example the victim’s race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.
The hate crimes law traces to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 then it has been expanded when Congress expanded it and added the sexual orientation and gender identity in 2009 But Mr. Sessions argued that state criminal laws against assault and murder were sufficient. But as attorney general he has vowed to enforce it.
The Ku Klux Klan actions is not different that ISIS actions, The Charlottesville car attack is not different than London attack, the hate was the motivation, people were killed and a car was used
According to Justin Levitt, The law professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and was a deputy in the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Obama administration.
“You don’t often see someone ramming a car into a peaceful protest,” he said. “The sorts of things you see in Charlottesville, you don’t see often.”
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| The Charlottesville Car attack |
Is the Charlottesville Car Attack a domestic terrorism?
According to Lisa Monaco, the former head of the Justice Department’s national security division and a former counter terrorism and Homeland Security adviser to President Barack Obama,
“I think the biggest question is whether the F.B.I. is going to investigate this as a domestic terrorism case, given the presence of groups that have been the subject of such investigations before or would meet their criteria, like the K.K.K., and the nature of the attack,” she said. “A guy plowed his car into a crowd of protesters — that kind of violence, committed for seeming political ends, is the very definition of domestic terrorism.”
Mr. Sessions said they would be looking at it in part as a domestic terrorist attack. “It does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute,” On ABC News’s “Good Morning America” on Monday.
Mr. Sessions said. “We are pursuing it in the Department of Justice in every way that we can make a case. You can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation towards the most serious charges that can be brought because this is unequivocally unacceptable and evil attack.”
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