Commonwealth Attorney David Chapman decided last week not to seek hate crime charges against a group of Charlottesville High School students accused of perpetrating a series of assaults against University students occurring between last September and this January.
The decision ends a controversy that has simmered since February over whether the alleged culprits should be brought up on hate crime charges in conjunction with other charges related to the assaults.
Hate crime laws give harsher sentences to crimes motivated by characteristics of the victim such as race. Virginia's hate crime law can raise some misdemeanors to felonies.
Nine black males, most of whom attend Charlottesville High School, are charged in the case. The assault victims all were either white or Asian.
Gordon L. Fields, 18, the only adult charged in the assaults, already pled guilty to a misdemeanor assault and battery charge last Thursday. He was sentenced to a month in jail and 50 hours of community service.
"He wasn't responding to anything that had anything to do with race," Fields' attorney J. Lloyd Snook III said.
Fields has returned to Charlottesville High School and the other suspects will remain in the Charlottesville school system unless they are convicted of felonies, Charlottesville School Board Chairman Richard Merriwether said.
The remaining defendants will be tried April 16.
The attacks were an "aberration" that has never happened before, Merriwether said.
Whether the assaults indicated race relations problems in the city or tense relations between the University and the Charlottesville community remains unclear.
Charlottesville's racial problems are no worse than those in other parts of the country, Merriwether said.
"The students at Charlottesville High School understand that there are problems and they're working to fix them," he added.
Chapman was unavailable to comment on his decision yesterday, but told the Washington Post last week that there was a lack of evidence to prove the attacks were racially motivated.
The European-American Unity and Rights Organization, headed by former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, had pushed the state to charge the alleged attackers with hate crimes.
Prosecutors often face difficulties charging assailants with hate crimes, University Law Prof. Kim Forde-Mazrui said.
If the alleged assailants had been charged with hate crimes, the prosecutors would have been required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the attacks were racially motivated.
This could have been difficult because evidence of motivation is often scarce, Forde-Mazrui said.
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