
NC Man convicted of death threat against Muslim candidate
Asheville, NC - (AP) A North Carolina man was convicted Friday of a charge he anonymously threatened to lynch a Muslim-American man who ran for a state Senate seat in Virginia, federal prosecutors said.
Joseph Cecil Vandevere, 53, of Black Mountain, faces a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison following his conviction in federal court in Asheville, North Carolina, according to U.S. Attorney Andrew Murrayโs office. A sentencing date wasnโt immediately set.
Vandevere, whose trial started Thursday, was charged in June with interstate communication of a threat to injure a person in connection with a tweet directed at candidate Qasim Rashid. The tweet included a picture of a lynching and read, โVIEW YOUR DESTINY.โ
Rashid, an attorney who works on immigrant rights cases, posted a screenshot of the threatening tweet in March 2018 and reported it to the FBI.
Rashid, who testified at the trial on Friday, said there would have been โzero consequencesโ if he had reported such a threat in his native Pakistan. He said the juryโs verdict is a powerful testament to the U.S. Constitutionโs guarantee of โequal protection and equal justice for all.โ
โThey looked at the facts. They looked at the law. They applied it to the situation and came up with a just verdict,โ he said in a telephone interview.
Rashid said the verdict doesnโt end his fight against hate and intolerance.
โIโve had justice but there are many others who have not,โ he added.
An attorney for Vandevere didnโt immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the verdict.
Rashid, a Democrat, lost his Nov. 5 bid to defeat an incumbent Republican state senator in Virginia.
In September, U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn Jr. rejected Vandevereโs argument that his indictment must be dismissed on First Amendment free speech grounds
Vandevereโs attorney, Andrew Banzhoff, claimed the communication in question was not a โtrue threat.โ
โIn 2019, the political arena necessarily includes the public exchange of political views that occurs daily on Twitter and other social media sites,โ Banzhoff wrote.
Cogburn Jr. said he couldnโt rule as a matter of law that the alleged threat was โpolitical hyperboleโ or that โno reasonable person would interpret this communication as a serious expression of intent to do harm.โ
The indictment identifies the victim only by the initials โQ.R.โ Federal prosecutors didnโt name Rashid in court filings but said the victimโs political campaign started well after the threat was made โand had no bearing on the threat.โ
Authorities also accused Vandevere of posting an anti-Semitic threat on a Florida synagogueโs Facebook page.
Investigators linked Vandevere to a threatening comment posted in February 2018 on the website of a synagogue in Plantation, Florida, according to an FBI agentโs affidavit. A rabbi at Ramat Shalom Synagogue contacted the FBI after somebody using the name Bob Smith posted a โdisturbingโ comment in response to the rabbiโs post showing support for the Parkland, Florida, high school where a gunman killed 17 people earlier that month, the agent wrote.
An โopen source searchโ using Vandevereโs telephone number linked him to the same Twitter account — with the handle โDaDUTCHMAN5โณ — that posted the threat against Rashid, according to the affidavit. The post was accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of the infamous 1915 lynching of a Jewish man, Leo Frank, in Marietta, Georgia.
Twitter suspended the โDaDUTCHMAN5โ account.
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Kunzelman reported from College Park, Md.