SonofNewo's Two Major Mistakes About the Charlottesville Incident

SonofNewo is the YouTube pseudonym of William Evans, who is an outstanding critic of the official account of the Charlottesville incident. (He himself has revealed his true name.)

SonofNewo's YouTube home page is there. A YouTube search for "SonofNewo Charlottesville" lists those videos.

I have been a regular viewer of SonofNewo's videos for about a half year. I generally appreciate and respect his intelligence and insights. I became interested in the Charlottesville incident because of his videos, and I have recommended to other people they they watch them.

One public service that SonofNewo has done was to make available on the Scribd website the transcript of the pretrial hearing of James Fields that took place on December 14, 2017.

I immediately began to study that transcript, and it has caused me to find more fault with SonofNewo's explanation of the Charlottesville incident. For a long time, I have sent him e-mails commenting in a civil manner on his videos. However, he has become suspicious of me, and so he recently blocked my e-mails.

For the record, I don't receive any money or other rewards for writing my opinions about the Charlottesville incident or about any other subject that I discuss in my several blogs. I never have earned any money from my blogs, and I have no plans to try to earn money from them.

Also, I don't have any private source of information. I have obtained all my information about the Charlottesville incident from the Internet -- and without any private guidance from anyone.

I have described myself in my Blogger profile.

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Here I will point out two major mistakes that SonofNewo makes in his explanation of the Charlottesville incident.

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Newspaper articles about the pretrial hearing are not better evidence about the hearing than the transcript is.

I don't know when SonofNewo obtained the hearing transcript, but I have the impression that there was a time when his only source of information about the hearing was newspaper articles about it. Since he does have the transcript now, he should treat the transcript as the most authoritative, currently available source of information about what was said and shown during the hearing  When there is a contradiction between the transcript and a newspaper article, then the transcript should be presumed correct and the article should be presumed mistaken.

I myself studied the transcript before I read any of the newspaper articles. When I did read the articles, I found that they included many mistakes about the hearing. For example, an AP News article about the hearing included the following passage:

Surveillance video from a restaurant showed the car head slowly in what Young testified was the direction of the counter-protesters, who were not in view of the camera. The car reversed before speeding forward into the frame again.

That statement is contradicted by the transcript, in which Detective Steven Young testified that the restaurant's surveillance camera filmed the car twice -- once driving forward and once driving backward. In particular, the video did not show the car "speeding forward into the frame".

I don't think that the AP News reporter is lying. Rather, I think that he simply misunderstood Young's testimony.

The above passage is merely one example of mistaken reporting about the hearing. I provided other examples in my previous article titled James Fields' Block-Long Backup on Fourth Street.

Reporters might have received and reported additional information in off-the-record conversations with knowledgeable officials. I appreciate any such additional information. However, when a journalistic report contradicts the transcript, then the journalistic report should be presumed to be mistaken.

Any journalistic report indicating that Fields' car was filmed passing through the restaurant camera's view more than twice -- 1) the first time forward southward, and then 2) the second time backward northward -- is mistaken.

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The restaurant video does not show the car driving south at a high rate of speed at 1:54:49.

During the pretrial hearing, some people in the audience caused two disturbances while the restaurant video was being shown. After the second disturbance, the prosecutor said she was resetting the video to 1:54:49.

SonofNewo thinks mistakenly that this moment in the video shows the car beginning to drive south at a high rate of speed".

The last bullet point is a mistake.

What the video actually shows after 1:43:49 is people running after the car, which already has driven southwards into the crowd and then backed up northwards through the restaurant camera's view. I explained this in my previous articles titled The Disturbances During the Pretrial Hearing and The Discrepancies Between the Camera Clocks. I will not repeat all that explanation here.

This mistake of SonofNewo was caused by his misreading of the following passage.

Judge
Quiet in the courtroom.

Bailiff
Quiet in the courtroom.

Judge
All right, he needs to go out. All of them.

Prosecutor
Your Honor, as you saw, that was the silver Dodge Challenger that drove south at a high rate of speed.

Judge
All right, once again, anybody else who makes a sound like that, out you go. All right.

Prosecutor
I’m pausing and starting again at 1:54:49 and Detective Young, you said it left view at a high rate of speed?

Detective Young
Yes. At this point, many people began to run after Mr. Fields and, at that point, encounter police as they ran east towards the police department.

(Page 32, lines 11 - 24)

When the prosecutor said Your Honor, as you saw, that was the silver Dodge Challenger that drove south at a high rate of speed, the prosecutor was reminding the judge about a set of facts that had been presented before that disturbance.

* The Dodge Challenger had driven south at a high rate of speed, according to eyewitnesses and to the helicopter video. The restaurant video had not shown the car driving southward at a high rate of speed.

* This same Dodge Challenger -- the one that had driven south at a high rate of speed according to eyewitnesses and to the helicopter video -- had been seen backing up northward in the restaurant video. Immediately when the restaurant video showed the car doing so, the second disturbance occurred in the courtroom.

* Before that disturbance in the courtroom, the restaurant video had shown that the car left view of the restaurant camera, backing up northwards at a high rate of speed.

Because of the courtroom disturbance, the prosecutor reset the video to 1:54:49, which was after the car already had backed up northward through the restaurant camera's view. Then the prosecutor showed the video's final part, which showed people running after the car.

I understand why SonofNewo interprets the above passage as he does, but his interpretation is mistaken. This one mistake has led to other mistakes in his analysis.