Virginia

Court Finds Virginia's Punitive Damages Cap Applies Per-Plaintiff in Charlottesville Case

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2 days ago

July 3, 2024

Court Finds Virginia's Punitive Damages Cap Applies Per-Plaintiff in Charlottesville Case

A federal appeals court has ruled that Virginia’s $350,000 punitive damages cap applies on a per-plaintiff basis in a case against white supremacists who organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.

A Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel in a 3-0 vote reversed a federal district court that had limited the punitive damages that the eight plaintiffs would receive to $350,000 aggregate. The appeals court found that in a case where there are multiple plaintiffs, the $350,000 cap applies to each plaintiff, not to the group as a whole.

In the opinion written by Chief Judge Albert Diaz, the appeals court rested its decision largely on the statute’s not mentioning plaintiffs and the fact that the state did not permit multiple plaintiff actions until well after the cap statute was drafted and enacted.

As a civil jury trial in 2022 proved, the protester-defendants — who included white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis— conspired to commit racially motivated violence to, in part, “defend Western civilization and white men against perceived enemies—specifically, Jewish persons, Black persons, and their white gentile traitor allies.” The protesters “sought violence, planned for violence, sparked violence, engaged in violence, and afterwards, glorified the violence” committed.

The jury found the defendants guilty of civil conspiracy; racial, religious, or ethnic harassment under Virginia’s hate-crime statute; assault and battery; and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Jury Award

The jury’s damages award against the protester-defendants totaled over $26 million, split among compensatory damages which the district court assigned jointly and severally against the defendants, and a historic $24 million in punitive damages. The district court ultimately slashed the punitive damages to $350,000 by applying Virginia’s punitive damages cap across the eight plaintiffs who sought them.

Defendants Michael Hill, Michael Tubbs, League of the South, and Nathan Damigo challenged the district court’s decision to hold them jointly and severally liable for the $26 million in compensatory damages award, while the plaintiffs challenged the district court’s decision to apply Virginia’s punitive damages cap across all plaintiffs.

Because the jury found that all the defendants engaged in a conspiracy, the district court applied the collective compensatory damages. The Fourth Circuit found no error in this part of the district court’s decision.

The defendants also argued that Virginia’s punitive damages cap should apply to the jury’s punitive damages award, reducing them to $350,000, and that the damages were constitutionally excessive.

The plaintiffs’ argued that the punitive damages cap only applies in “run-of-the-mill” tort and insurance cases and not at all than in the hate-crime context. The plaintiffs’ fallback contention was that the cap applies on a per-plaintiff basis, with each plaintiff receiving $350,000.

The district court rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments that the punitive damages cap should not be applied at all and that the cap applies on a per-plaintiff basis.

The Fourth Circuit also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that punitive damages statute does not apply to hate crimes. The court cited the plain language of the statute that says it applies to ‘all actions” and not just some actions. The court noted that Virginia passed its hate-crime statute only a year after passing its punitive damages cap. It therefore had an opportunity to exclude hate crimes from the cap’s purview but it didn’t.

However, citing history, statute language and public policy, the Fourth Circuit agreed with the plaintiffs that the cap applies per-plaintiff.

The statute says in part that the “total amount awarded for punitive damages against all defendants found to be liable shall be determined by the trier of fact. In no event shall the total amount awarded for punitive damages exceed $350,000.”

First the appeals court noted that the punitive damages statute doesn’t include similar “all plaintiffs” language as it does “all defendants” and the court believes there are good reasons for that legislative drafting. If lawmakers meant to treat defendants and plaintiffs equally under the statute, even with the “all defendants” qualifier, that would render that term superfluous.

Another reason relates to the state’s historical understanding of joinder. and the fact that when the punitive damages cap was enacted in 1987 the common law largely didn’t permit separate plaintiffs to jointly adjudicate their claims. So an “action” was typically one plaintiff prosecuting one claim. There were no multiple plaintiff actions.

Virginia adhered to this common-law approach until 1995, when the General Assembly permitted a court to join separate actions, or six or more plaintiffs to join in a single action. But these joinder principles were enacted after the punitive damages cap passed in 1987.

“As a matter of text and history then, the General Assembly could not have contemplated including a multi-plaintiff limitation in the punitive damages cap because single-plaintiff actions were the norm,” the appeals court explained.

Furthermore, the court found that a per- plaintiff reading serves public policy interests by incentivizing plaintiffs to join their claims where appropriate. “Were we to hold otherwise, any plaintiffs seeking punitive damages against a defendant (or defendants) for a single occurrence would have 350,000 reasons not to join their claims. And had that been the law here, the district court likely would have faced eight trials in a loop of repeat operative facts and players,” Judge Diaz wrote.

Photo: James Kolenich, left, attorney for Jason Kessler, speaks with the media after a jury gave a partial verdict in Sines v Kessler case Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2021, at the Federal Courthouse in Charlottesville, Va. A jury ordered white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay more than $25 million in damages Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2021, over violence that erupted during the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The lawsuit accused some of the country’s most well-known white nationalists of plotting the violence, including Jason Kessler. (Andrew Shurtleff/The Daily Progress via AP)

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Virginia

Meet Virginia: Madeleine Bolton

Published

56 mins ago

July 5, 2024

Press Room

Madeleine Bolton’s fingerprints are all over Colonial Williamsburg. Her footprints, too.

That’s because 26-year-old Bolton, three years into a six-year brickmaking and masonry trades apprenticeship, has a hand in making some of the tens of thousands of clay bricks used to restore, repair, and build structures on the 300-acre historic site.

“The amount of clay is the pressure, you know, and stuff like that. I really enjoy molding. I like trying to get it exactly right, trying to slot it in there perfectly, I think that’s kind of fun to do. Like, if they want to see how I do it, I have to mentally think, ‘I need to go slower.’ My want is to go really fast, because it’s kind of fun to be like, ‘Oooh, yeah. Slap it in there, squish it down,’ which is also what I think about when I’m talking: ‘Slower. Don’t talk so fast,’” she says with a laugh.

But, if she does go fast, Bolton can fashion about 180 bricks an hour: patty-caking a 10-pound wad of wet clay into a ball before rolling it in fine sand and slapping it into a wooden form. From there, the still-soft shapes are emptied onto a flat sand patch, covered in canvas, and left to sun dry.

Come fall, Bolton will help build and stoke a massive brick kiln, and over four or five days and nights, fire the summer lot of bricks at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to a purpley-brown crisp.

It’s satisfying, hot, monotonous work. Bolton makes the occasional foot and handprint, like a secret, collective brickmakers’ prank. Look closely at original buildings in Williamsburg, and you can see Bolton’s 17th and 18th century counterparts: some free, but many enslaved.

“For us, like I said, we work an 8-hour day, like, we can leave when the day is done,” she notes. “We go home, and we think about people that came before, the enslaved laborer, making all these bricks historically. They’re making them because the next day’s not going to be any different. Talk about like how much labor and suffering came from this. Because, of course, today, all of us in the brickyard, we’re working for a wage. And they wouldn’t have been. The bricklayer historically could maybe work their way up to kind of a merchant level class. But the brickmaker, they work until they can’t anymore. And people all on that site, the enslaved labor, making all those bricks, that’s all they might know.”

Bolton’s original plan, to be an epidemiologist, was scrapped when COVID-19 struck her senior year at James Madison University.

“I’d always been somewhat obsessed with that, even as like a middle schooler, which is kind of creepy in retrospect,” she says. “I was so into it and excited about learning about disease pathways and disease response, and about how we tackle these global issues. And then seeing it falter, and seeing exactly how fraught it became, it made me less and less enthused to run into that brick wall. I was thinking about other ways to make myself helpful.”

After graduating, and casting about for some months, she landed the gig in Williamsburg in 2021. She’s one of about 30 apprentices there.

“It’s probably not something young Madeleine ever thought she would be doing, but I definitely enjoy it now. I’m very much a details person, like, to a fault,” Bolton admits. “So it works out as I’ve always liked figuring stuff out in some degree. And this offers quite a multitude of ways to do that.”

Case in point is the brickmakers’ forthcoming pug mill, a room-sized clay mixer that has a vertical shaft that, when the wheelwright finishes it, will connect to a horse whose circles will stir it. The pug mill also means Bolton won’t have to spend as much time in the pit, cutting clay with her bare feet, as the 17th and 18th century brickmakers did before her.

Plus, you know, the horse.

“We’ve already named the horse. I’m super excited. Buckwheat. That’s a brickyard classic right there,” she says with a laugh.

Our partner station WVTF has shared the stories of people across Virginia—teachers, immigrants, business owners, and others all year in a special series “Meet Virginia.”

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Virginia

Va. traffic fatalities increased 24% over past decade and more state headlines • Virginia Mercury

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7 hours ago

July 5, 2024

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Va. traffic fatalities increased 24% over past decade and more state headlines • Virginia Mercury

• “ACLU of Virginia sues Hanover School Board on behalf of transgender student allegedly banned from sports team.”—WRIC

• “Virginia traffic fatalities increase 24% over past decade and it’s costing the Commonwealth billions.”—13NewsNow

• “Virginia allocates record $207M for soil and water conservation.”—Times Virginian

• “Virginia offshore wind lease sale planned for August.”—Virginian-Pilot

• “When veterans and their spouses die, he inscribes the words that describe them.”—Washington Post

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Caesars Virginia expansion promises a top-tier resort experience in Danville

Published

14 hours ago

July 4, 2024

Press Room

Caesars Virginia expansion promises a top-tier resort experience in Danville

DANVILLE, Va. (WSET) — When you’re driving through Danville, Caesars Virginia is sure to catch your eye, and by the end of the year, it’s going to be bigger and better than ever.

All of our wonderful restaurants, our bars, our pool, our spa,” said Chris Albrecht, Caesars Virginia General Manager. “This a true destination resort experience here in Danville.

The permanent casino will have more than 1,400 slot machines, about 80 table games, seven restaurants, and much more.

Albrecht said that construction for the permanent casino is going well. They have about 1,000 workers on site every day. A lot of progress has been made on the outside with getting the walls up. They expect the parking garage to be finished in the next few weeks. They also plan to focus on the inside and getting walls up for the restaurants, the hotel, and the convention space.

“The casino floor itself, you can actually walk on the inside, and you know where all of the different components are now going to be because you can see it all come together and taking shape and it’s really exciting,” Albrecht said.

Temporary casino in Danville celebrates one-year-anniversary

The temporary casino has been sparking a lot of economic growth in the area since it opened last May and officials hope that trend continues when permanent casino is complete. In terms of revenue, Albrecht said he thinks the temporary casino has exceeded what the city has budgeted to receive from the casino.

That’s just indirect impact. There’s also the indirect impact of those customers and workers that are here utilizing local amenities,” Albrecht said. “They’re staying in those hotels, they’re staying and enjoying those restaurants here on top of that. So, it’s not just what we bring directly to the casino, but it’s that compounding effect, that multiplier effect.

When the casino is finished, Albrecht said that Caesars Virginia will give you an experience like no other.

“Hopefully we’re going to see people not just from what we’re seeing in the temporary facility, but they’ll come from much farther away taking cars, planes, trains, or whatever to come see just a truly special transformative operation here,” Albrecht said.

Danville City Council approves an updated $750 million agreement with Caesars Casino

When the grand opening day comes, Albrecht hopes the community and staff will feel a sense of pride.

“That they’ve been a part of something that’s truly transformed into something special for the city of Danville and I think we’re going to deliver on that,” Albrecht said.

Caesars Virginia is looking to hire about 700 to 800 employees for the permanent casino. They are already working on planning hiring events in the city and surrounding areas.

There isn’t an official opening date yet. But officials say the casino is still on track to be completed late this year.

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