Criminal proceedings against man in connection with UVa torchlight march 2017 discontinued

Judge Thomas Padrick said Thursday that he had to dismiss criminal charges against Jacob Joseph Dix of Clarksville, Ohio, based on the First Amendment.

Dix was accused of using fire for racial intimidation on the night of August 11, 2017. He carried a burning tiki torch across UVa while wearing a T-shirt homaging genocidal dictator Adolf Hitler.

“This is akin to burning a flag,” Padrick said in Albemarle County District Court. “It's in bad taste and I don't agree with it, but the Supreme Court has defended it. It's constitutional freedom of speech.”

In granting Dix's attorney's motion to dismiss the charges – a motion the judge had previously put forward for deliberation – Padrick said he was particularly concerned about a “concerted action instruction” from the jury that would find everyone who was involved in any way equally guilty.

“When I issued that order, I did so with great legal care,” Padrick said. “Each of them committed a crime?” the judge asked rhetorically. “Each of them, just because they carried a lit tiki torch, marched in formation and spewed hate speech?”

Evidence at trial revealed that Dix wore a shirt that night with the number “88,” a white nationalist code word for “Heil Hitler” (H is the eighth letter of the alphabet). But there was no evidence that he did what some of the other protesters did: “Jews will not replace us.”

“We always say, 'Let the jury decide,'” Padrick said. “I left it to the jury and reconsidered.”

Padrick also seemed to change his mind.

“We're talking about something that happened seven years ago and no prosecutor would have ever charged it,” Padrick said.

After the 2017 march, there were calls to prosecute the participants, but Albemarle's acting district attorney, Robert Tracci, said there is no law criminalizing this behavior.

Tracci's successor, Jim Hingeley, who was elected in 2019, promised during the campaign that he would sue under a never-before-touched law that Virginia lawmakers drafted in 2002 as a content-neutral way to ban the Ku Klux Klan's burning of crosses. Hingeley announced the first wave of prosecutions in April 2023.

Like the 16th Judicial District judges, Hingeley was eventually removed from the Dix case after Dix's attorney argued that Hingeley and an assistant district attorney created a conflict of interest by working too closely with counterprotesters in 2017 and making statements attacking white nationalist ideas. Hingeley was not in court at the time of Thursday's dismissal but was working as a special prosecutor in Fluvanna County and said it was too early to announce any strategic moves.

“We need to digest and process what happened,” he told The Daily Progress.

The Dix case was instead prosecuted in June by Henrico County Attorney Shannon Taylor, who is currently running for Virginia attorney general. Taylor also did not appear in court Thursday but was represented by Nael Abouzaki, the assistant district attorney.

“Prosecutors bring the truth to light to achieve justice, and that's what we did in this case,” Abouzaki said afterward. “And today we heard from the judge.”

At the inconclusive trial, the foreman said three jurors found Dix guilty, eight wanted acquittal and one was undecided. An alternate juror interviewed by The Daily Progress said he would have voted for acquittal.

“The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is non-negotiable and this charge should never have been brought,” said Dix's attorney Peter Frazier.

Five other defendants have already been convicted of aggravated intimidation and two others recently had their cases reduced to lesser misdemeanors. Dix said he is confident about the outcome of his case, but the fight has cost a lot of time and money.

“Tens of thousands of dollars later, the punishment is the trial,” Dix told reporters on the courthouse steps.

Dix told The Daily Progress that the Henrico district attorney approached his lawyer in the courthouse hallway the night the case was dismissed to offer him a no-jail-free plea deal for a misdemeanor.

“After thinking about it for two seconds,” Dix said, “I leaned back to my lawyer and told him, 'Never.'”

Dix, who was 22 at the time of the march in 2017 and is now 29, said he has since retired the No. 88 jersey.

“That was a more radical time for me,” said Dix. “I don't want to apologize for mistakes of the past, but I don't represent the same values.”