Jury convicts man for racist rally violence after federal judge rejects guilty plea
The trial in Los Angeles followed two dismissals by a previous judge who said prosecutors unfairly targeted white supremacists because of their political beliefs.
A federal jury in Los Angeles on Tuesday convicted a man of rioting and conspiracy for violence at political rallies in a seven-year-old case that a previous judge twice dismissed.
Robert Edward Boman, 31, left the courthouse with his girlfriend after the jury verdict and is to return on Aug. 1 for sentencing. He testified in his defense on Monday and told jurors he didn’t plan to attack people when he went to rallies in 2017 with friends.
“That wasn’t my reason for being out there. It wasn’t to fight everybody. I got attacked time and again and didn’t feel the need to defend myself,” Boman testified.
Boman’s lawyer Peter Swarth played video of Boman slapping a man in the face. Boman said the man was “talking trash.”
“And your response was to slap him?” Swarth asked.
“Yeah,” Boman answered.
“Was that an appropriate response?” Swarth asked.
“Not in the slightest, no. I feel it was the wrong action to do. A lot of the actions I took that day were wrong,” Boman answered.
Swarth told jurors in his closing argument that members of “Antifa” were throwing open cans of beer or soda at people and, “as that’s happening to you, regardless of why you’re there, you think you get a bit pissy?”
In rebuttal, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathrynne Seiden referenced Swarth’s comment and told jurors, “You don’t get to commit a crime because you’re feeling pissy.”
“Pissy is not the law,” she said.
U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton presided over the five-day trial. She was assigned the case in July after the original judge, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, took senior inactive status. Carney twice dismissed the charges against Boman and his codefendants, including Rise Above Movement founder Robert Rundo, but the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals overturned him both times.
Rundo pleaded guilty last year to one count of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-Riot Act. He left jail in December after being sentenced to two years in prison with credit for time served. He’s on probation for two years. Codefendant Tyler Laube pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor last year and was credited for 35 days already served in jail, fined $2,000 and ordered to be on probation for one year.
Boman reached a plea deal with prosecutors in 2023, but he never pleaded guilty. Instead, Judge Carney said at the change-of-plea hearing that he didn’t believe a guilty plea would be legally valid because the facts of the case didn’t support it.
Carney later dismissed the indictment under a motion brought by Rundo’s lawyers that argued the U.S. Department of Justice selectively prosecuted the men because of their political beliefs while ignoring similar violence from leftwing activists. The judge said he didn’t believe an Orange County jury would convict any of conspiring to assault protestors when the men were focused on Antifa assailants “who were determined to hurt and injure innocent people.”
The 12 jurors who convicted Boman of rioting and conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-Riot Act on Tuesday were selected from a pool of 80 people from Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
They heard police testimony and saw videos from the rallies, including in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, and they heard expert testimony from Pete Simi, a Chapman University sociology professor who studies white supremacy and right-wing extremism. They also saw racist social media posts from Boman and his co-conspirators, and they saw promotional videos for RAM that Simi described as white supremacist propaganda.
Seiden reminded jurors of Simi’s testimony during her closing argument on Tuesday.
“They’re not just showing themselves working out. … They’re sprinkling in messaging that furthers their violent white supremacist ideology, and they’re asking people to retweet it and to share it,” Seiden said.
Seiden emphasized that Boman “is not on trial for his ideology, and he’s not on trial for being a member of a group.”
“That in itself is not illegal, but he did commit a crime by agreeing with that group to go riot,” said Seiden, who prosecuted Boman with Assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Boylan.
Jurors also heard from two journalists who were working for the now-defunct OC Weekly newspaper in 2017 and testified about Boman and the violence at the Huntington Beach rally.
Photographer Brian Feinzimer said a fight broke out when a woman hit his camera with an American flag, and someone “misinterpreted me trying to get her away from me as me pushing her” and punched him and his colleague Frank Tristan.
Jurors saw video of the fight, and a photo Feinzimer took of the woman hitting his camera with her flag was entered as evidence. Feinzimer testified he saw other fights and “there was a lot of people throwing punches at each other.”
“It was just chaotic. It was kind of a free for all,” Feinzimer said.
Boman was the only defense witness. He said he began resenting racial minorities when he and his sister were among the few white children in their elementary school and endured bullying and violence.
“I was racially targeted. I mean, when I say I was literally fighting every day, defending my sister or myself just walking to and from school, it was a daily thing,” he said.
Boman said he worked with a man who introduced him to RAM, but he said “for my moral values at that point in time in my life I was against the type of language he would use,” including his “flagrant with the n-word.” Swarth asked if he was “into” the man’s racism when he went to the 2017 rallies, and Boman answered, “Not as much as I feel a lot of people would think.”
Boman said he didn’t attend the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, after the California rallies because he didn’t want to protest the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue. Boman called Lee “a piece of shit.”
“He was racist to the bone, and it should have gotten taken down,” Boman testified.
Seiden told jurors in her closing that Boman’s racist social media posts contradict his testimony.
“He told you he didn’t go because it was too racist. Look at the things he was posting and decide for yourselves, ‘Is that credible?’ Is it credible that someone would decline to go to an event because it’s too racist, and then post those kinds of things the day before the event and the day after the event?” she said.
Seiden began her cross-examination of Boman by playing video from the Huntington Beach rally.
“Mr. Boman, that was you who kicked someone in the back, correct?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah,” Boman answered.
“And that was you who shoved someone in the back, correct? Who was walking away from you?” Seiden asked.
“Yeah,” Boman answered.
Boman testified he went to Berkeley to protect speakers at the rally, so Seiden showed video and asked, “That was you yelling, ‘You want it, right?’” Boman said he didn’t hear, so Seiden asked if he was protecting speakers or providing security and he answered, “No.”
Swarth said in his closing that Boman’s cross lacked probing questions about the alleged conspiracy.
“The government had an opportunity to ask my client, ‘Why did you go?’ ‘What were you doing?’ ‘What was the conversation the night before?’” Swarth said. “Those questions don’t serve the government’s theory, so they don’t ask. But the evidence is there. And Robert Boman gave you the evidence. He said he wasn’t there to fight with everybody.”
Seiden also told jurors that “one intentional act of rioting is enough, even if you find that there were a couple of instances in which defendant was not the initial aggressor.”
“There was violence on both sides that day, and no one has shied away from that,” she said.
Jurors deliberated about 2 1/2 hours before they asked two questions: “Is being part of a group enough to knowingly join existing conspiracy?” and “if Robert Boman is a member of RAM.” They reached a verdict before they heard the answers.
You can read the jury instructions here.
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