Anti-fascist protesters take deals in California Capitol clash with white nationalists
Three years after white nationalists and anti-fascists spilled blood in a violent brawl on the grounds of the state Capitol, the case ended in Sacramento on Thursday with misdemeanor plea deals for the three protesters arrested in the clash.
Berkeley teacher and activist Yvonne Felarca; student Porfirio Paz and Michael Williams, who provided security for counter-demonstrators protesting the June 2016 rally of Golden State Skinheads and Traditionalist Worker Party members at the Capitol, each pleaded no contest to single counts of misdemeanor unlawful assembly.
The pleas before Sacramento Superior Court Judge Richard Sueyoshi avoided a certain trial for the trio – the case was assigned earlier Thursday to Sueyoshi’s courtroom for trial on felony assault charges.
With the pleas, Felarca, Paz and Williams must each perform 90 hours of community service and will get three years of informal probation.
Sueyoshi also barred them from protesting for the duration of their community service.
“It’s a just resolution for everyone because it prevents a trial from happening which often increases tensions on both sides,” Mark Reichel, Paz’s attorney, said Thursday. “This is a very simple misdemeanor which will go off their records in 18 months.”
In a prepared statement, Sacramento County Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Grippi called the plea deal a “fair and just resolution.”
“The Sacramento District Attorney’s Office has great respect for the First Amendment and in the rights of citizens to exercise that freedom. However, when orchestrated acts of violence take place in our county, whether in the name of free speech or in an effort to prevent it, our obligation is to hold those individuals accountable,” Grippi said. “This plea agreement is a fair and just resolution under the circumstances of this case.”
The plea agreement resolved a case that began when protesters faced off with the white supremacists at the nationalist rally. The protests quickly devolved into rock-throwing, knife-wielding chaos. At least 10 people were wounded in the bloody brawl, many of whom were stabbed.
California Highway Patrol, the agency that patrols the Capitol, faced heavy criticism for its perceived lack of response to the violence that overtook the grounds.
Few were charged in the battle despite the bloodshed and the yearlong CHP investigation in its aftermath. Assault charges for the trio were reduced to a misdemeanor earlier this year.
The lone white supremacist charged in the riots, William Scott Planer, was sentenced in July to time served on felony assault charges connected to the fighting. Planer in 2017 was extradited to California from Colorado, where he had been held on charges of vandalizing a synagogue in Colorado Springs.
A Sacramento jury in February deadlocked 8-4 to convict Planer at trial on the assault charge. Planer remained in custody as Sacramento prosecutors decided whether to retry the case before he agreed in April to plead no contest to the assault charge.
Meantime, Felarca, Williams and their attorneys denounced the case against them as a sham from the outset, accusing local law enforcement and prosecutors of providing cover for white supremacists while targeting counter-protesters.
“They came with knives. People almost died,” Felarca said of the nationalist groups at the Sacramento rally after an August appearance in Sacramento Superior Court. Felarca was one of those hurt in the riot. She needed 24 stitches to close head and arm wounds, attorneys said.
At that same August appearance was Gerald O’Bannon, a photographer who was attacked while documenting the protest. O’Bannon, who was stabbed, showed a reporter the scar from a deep puncture wound that he said came from the end of an attacker’s flag pole, a knife affixed to its tip.
O’Bannon needed surgery to repair the stab wound. No one was charged in his attack.
“It’s (a) Sunday, there are hundreds of law enforcement around and they let it go down like a prison melee,” O’Bannon said of authorities’ response to the rioting.
Defense attorneys and county prosecutors continued to negotiate a deal for the counter-protesters, who had become known to their supporters as the “Sacramento 3,” Paz’s defense attorney, Mark Reichel, said Thursday.
“We spent a long period of time working on a resolution,” Reichel said, adding both sides anticipated a difficult case to try. “There is sympathy for standing up to fascist white supremacists. At the end of the day, this is a violent group that believes in genocide against non-whites and these three people went there to oppose it and laid their lives on the line for it.”
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