Cases dismissed against men charged with helping take down UNC’s Silent Sam statue
Orange County prosecutors dismissed charges this week against two men who had appealed their conviction in the 2018 toppling of the Silent Sam Confederate statue on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus.
The decision was based on having to prioritize cases piling up in the Orange County court system since it was shut down by the COVID-19 outbreak in March, Orange-Chatham District Attorney Jim Woodall said.
“We’re not in control of COVID-19 and we’ve had no control over the fact that we’ve had court shut down, and realistically, it will be months and months before we ever get to these cases, and we simply have to prioritize,” Woodall said.
Raul Arce Jimenez and Shawn Birchfield-Finn, along with three others, were charged with injury to real property, misdemeanor riot and defacing a public statue or monument after the statue’s removal in August 2018. Jimenez also was charged in connection with the 2017 toppling of the Durham Confederate statue but was later found not guilty.
District Court Judge Lunsford Long dismissed the charges against two defendants in April 2019, but convicted Jimenez and Birchfield-Finn of all three charges and and sentenced them to 24 hours in jail. Their attorney Scott Holmes appealed the case to Superior Court and requested a jury trial, delaying the sentence.
Holmes got an email Tuesday notifying him that the cases, which were scheduled for a Feb. 15 hearing, had been dismissed.
“I’m very pleased. I’m glad they did it,” Holmes said.
Evidence was ‘very weak,’ says attorney
Holmes has represented most of the people charged in connection with anti-racism protests in Chapel Hill in recent years. The other cases were dismissed outright or after his clients did community service, he said.
The prosecution’s evidence against Jimenez and Birchfield-Finn was “very weak,” he said.
“The way that that particular event unfolded, all of the police officers kind of moved away from Silent Sam shortly before it was pulled down, so no officers actually witnessed the pulling of it and no arrests were made at the scene,” Holmes said.
“The only evidence they had was basically video from media coverage in the dark, and the state asked the judge just to look at the video and look at my clients in court to see if they can make an identification themselves,” he said. “My view is that a jury would have a hard time convicting people just based upon trying to look at a video like that.”
UNC placed Silent Sam in storage after the protest and removed the statue’s base in January 2019.
Many more Confederate monuments have been removed around the state in the wake of the Durham and Chapel Hill protests, and some of those involved in the UNC protests have since moved on to Alamance County, where Black Lives Matter demonstrators are calling for the Confederate statue there to be removed.
Hundreds of cases dismissed
The Silent Sam case is among hundreds dismissed over the past year, Woodall said. In District Court, about 1,500 Orange County cases were dismissed and roughly half that number were dismissed in Chatham County, he said.
The cases marked for dismissal involve misdemeanors, such as traffic violations, and less-serious crimes in which no one was hurt, he said. Murders, rapes, DWIs, robberies and other more serious crimes will still be prosecuted when jury trials restart in the next few months. It still could take a few years to catch up on all the cases delayed, he said.
The Orange County Courthouse in Hillsborough remains closed to the general public, although some cases are being handled in person. Other cases, including Superior Court cases that are not going to a jury, have been handled online via Webex.
“We’re dismissing quite a few things in Superior Court. It’s not got anything to do with some of these Silent Sam cases. It’s got to do with COVID and we know we can’t get all these cases tried, so we are prioritizing things,” Woodall said.
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 2:12 PM with the headline "Cases dismissed against men charged with helping take down UNC’s Silent Sam statue."
