,
11 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
after countless incidents of intimidation, verbal harassment, and numerous actual assaults on community members, local racist mason pickett has finally been convicted of assault and battery.
the consequences pickett will face for this assault and battery are very minor - simply a $100 fine.
but now it’s on the record. next time he does it, and there will be a next time, the court will have to acknowledge this as a pattern of behavior. i’m grateful to the victim whose willingness to come forward helped establish that fact for future victims.
in this particular case, the victim was commemorating the anniversary of heather heyer’s murder by standing near the lee statue with a sign about the need to remove the statues. that statue, as pictured on the unite the right event flyer, brought the nazi who killed her here.
as he stood quietly, alone, on that street corner on august 12, 2019, he was approached by a man he did not know. as a relatively new transplant to our town, he’d not had the misfortune of being screamed at by our local angry racist with nothing better to do.
pickett approached him with a sign that said “IDIOT” with an arrow pointing at the man whose quiet commemoration of the violence two years earlier he was mocking.
after patiently allowing this for some time, including while being photographed by a reporter with the associated press, he grew tired of the mockery. when another man asked for a picture, he tried to get away from pickett so the photograph wouldn’t show the mocking sign.
throughout their interaction, there was a lot of jockeying for position, each man trying to position his protest sign to the greatest perceived effect. when the man was behind pickett, he moved quickly to return to his original spot on the corner.
pickett turned around and shouldered the man, who had stopped moving at this point, hard in the chest. this is on video.
pickett’s attorney argued, bafflingly, that this whole thing was probably a setup, saying that mason’s two previous acquittals for assault were intentionally staged by people who wanted to charge him with assault & that this was more of the same.
the judge ruled that any self defense argument was ineffective - the time between the victim’s forward motion toward pickett & pickett striking him was “sufficiently temporally attenuated” - that is, pickett did not strike someone who was advancing on him. he’d stopped feet away.
