Court orders white nationalists to pay $2M more for Charlottesville Unite the Right violence

Four years after violence erupted during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a jury ordered white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay a total of more than $26 million in damages to people with physical or emotional injuries from the event.

Most of that money — $24 million — was for punitive damages, but a judge later slashed that amount to $350,000 — to be shared by eight plaintiffs. On Monday, a federal appeals court restored more than $2 million in punitive damages, finding that each of the plaintiffs should receive $350,000, instead of the $43,750 each would have received under the lower court’s ruling.

A three-judge panel of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the jury’s award of $2 million in compensatory damages, but found that a state law that imposes the $350,000 cap on punitive damages should be applied per person instead of for all eight plaintiffs, as a lower court judge ruled.

The ruling stems from a federal lawsuit against two dozen white nationalists and organizations that participated in two days of demonstrations in Charlottesville to protest the city’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Read more: ABC News