[Paleopsych] NYT: New Tactics, Tools and Goals Are Emerging for White Power Organizations
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New Tactics, Tools and Goals Are Emerging for White Power Organizations
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/06/national/06white.html
5.4.6
[Appended below: 1. The NYT reporting that Hale got 40 years, but with no
mention that the penality was increased on the grounds that Hale is a
terrorist; 2. A protest from the left; 3. The Chicago Tribune article
about the sentencing, which says this is the first time in Chicago that a
penalty was increased because of terrorism (and perhaps the third time in
the country as a whole.)]
By KIRK JOHNSON
ST. LOUIS, April 5 - Frank Weltner's cluttered living room is one of
the unlikely new hot spots in America's old and ongoing preoccupation
with race.
Mr. Weltner, a 63-year-old former local radio talk show host, began
what white power groups say is the first round-the-clock racial
Webcast this year. He can run many Web sites, including what he calls
his most popular one, [2]Jewwatch.com, with a laptop computer and a
microphone from the comfort of his couch.
Technically savvy and politically in tune with their communities, Mr.
Weltner and people like him are the new figures to watch in the white
power world, say people who track extremist groups. Many of the
national organizations - like the Aryan Nation, Creativity and the
National Alliance, Mr. Weltner's group - have fragmented in the last
few years. Some leaders, including Matthew Hale, the former head of
Creativity, who is to be sentenced on Wednesday for soliciting the
murder of a federal judge, have been removed; others have died.
"The hate groups are in disarray; the leaders have died or been
jailed," said Karen Aroesty, the St. Louis-based regional director for
Missouri and Southern Illinois for the Anti-Defamation League. "But
what we've seen, particularly here, is a more sophisticated use of
mainstream media tools in order to sell the product."
The breakdown in national leadership has coincided, outside experts
and group members say, with a transformation of tools and goals. Some
corners of the Internet are openly racist, but local groups have
broadened their message to include immigration and adopted more subtle
appeals to attract new followers.
Mr. Weltner said he preached love for the white race - not hatred for
any other - and grass-roots action to protect the European gene pool
in the United States, which he said was being diluted by immigration.
"Think racially, act locally," he said.
The Internet, with its anonymity and lack of physical geography, does
not lend itself to bossy leaders or compounds in the woods. Locally
autonomous groups can also better refine their message to fit the
markets, which further fuels the fragmentation. Here in St. Louis,
which has long been one of the nation's most segregated cities,
separatism - not supremacy - is the racial term of art. Jeff Weise,
the 16-year-old who killed nine people and himself last month on an
Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, was touched by the arguments
of separatism and genetic purity, which he wrote about often in
postings on the Internet.
Brian H. Levin, a professor of criminal justice and director of the
Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State
University, San Bernardino, said cruising the Internet for extremist
racial views had become like shopping for books or airfares - an
endless consumer choice.
"On the Internet, you can craft your own buffet of hate," Professor
Levin said.
He cautioned, however, that the growth of racialist content on the Web
did not necessarily mean a rise in racism in the country. The
Internet's expansion into every niche of society, Professor Levin
said, could merely be giving voice to impulses already there.
Some parts of the white power movement are clearly more underground
than ever, diffused and dispersed into the virtual cyberspace of Web
sites that claim more members than the estimated size of the Ku Klux
Klan. [3]Whiterevolution.com solicits donations via credit card.
Other elements are reaching out more than ever for a public role and a
piece of the nation's debate on subjects like immigration and the
growing gap between rich and poor. Adherents to the movement say the
two pieces fit perfectly.
Mr. Weltner's group, the National Alliance, spent $1,500 in February,
for example, to put advertisements on the local transit trains in St.
Louis, and has distributed tens of thousands of leaflets just about
every weekend in recent months urging residents to "love your race."
The Council of Concerned Citizens, which is based here and has worked
to protect use of the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina and
Mississippi, is talking more and more about immigration, especially
nonwhite illegal immigrants. The group's chief executive, Gordon Lee
Baum, said in an interview that immigrants were taking American jobs
and pushing the nation toward what he called "third-world status."
"As communities suffer the results of massive illegal immigration,
it's become a growing concern all over the U.S.," Mr. Baum said. He
said big companies bringing in cheap foreign labor were as much to
blame as anyone.
"In southwest Missouri," he said, "there's a county down there now
that is almost a majority Hispanic because of a big meat-processing
plant."
Some local civic leaders here say the debate itself is frightening -
either because the mainstream society might come to accept a
race-based perspective as part of legitimate public discourse or
because people in economically battered cities like St. Louis might
actually be listening.
"Groups that used to meet in secrecy are now coming out into the
light," said Esther L. Wright, vice president and general manager at
WGNU, an AM talk-radio station here that once employed both Mr.
Weltner and Mr. Baum as hosts. "That they're becoming more acceptable
is just another example of the moral decay of the society."
(Mr. Weltner's and Mr. Baum's programs were canceled last fall. Ms.
Wright said that there were violations of station policy but that she
could not elaborate; Mr. Weltner and Mr. Baum said changes in
political taste at the station forced them out.)
Some of the results of the racialist public outreach here come close
to comedy. In February, for example, the owner of the Bevo Mill
restaurant here, David Hanon, got what he thought was a routine
booking for a private party. The European Cultural Society wanted to
use his restaurant to bring in an Irish dancing school for the day and
have a party to celebrate, as the group's name suggested, European
culture.
Then a reporter from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called and asked
whether Mr. Hanon knew that the European Cultural Society was a front
for the National Alliance, a group classified as a neo-Nazi
organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks
extremist groups.
Mr. Hanon immediately canceled the event. "A lot of people were
duped," he said.
The National Alliance's transit train advertisements, meanwhile, were
so vague and innocuous that few people, including the transit system's
administrators, knew what was being advertised until the one-month
contract had all but run out. The posters simply said, "The future
belongs to us!" with a National Alliance contact number.
Some experts say the atomization of the white organizations like the
National Alliance and the Aryan Nation and the simultaneous rise of
white power on the Internet make the groups less relevant. Mr. Hale,
for example, had largely been marginalized in the movement, the
experts say, since his conviction last year for soliciting the murder
of a federal judge, Joan Humphrey Lefkow, who presided over a
trademark infringement case involving the name of Mr. Hale's group.
Chat rooms have buzzed in recent weeks, and Mr. Hale's star has risen
again if only as a symbol, after the murder of Judge Lefkow's husband
and mother. The police say the crime was unrelated to Mr. Hale or
white power groups, though cheers for those deaths were posted on some
racial Web sites.
"The movement as a whole is in the process of sorting itself out,
finding its next set of directions, but that doesn't make it less
dangerous," said Leonard Zeskind, a writer who has been monitoring
white supremacist activity for 25 years.
"People don't need to be followers of groups," Mr. Zeskind added.
"They just need to be angry."
References
2. http://Jewwatch.com/
3. http://Whiterevolution.com/
-------------
The New York Times > National > 40-Year Term for Supremacist in Plot on Judge
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/national/07hale.html
5.4.7
40-Year Term for Supremacist in Plot on Judge
By JODI WILGOREN
CHICAGO, April 6 - Matthew Hale, the white supremacist convicted last
year of plotting to assassinate a federal judge, was sentenced
Wednesday to 40 years in prison for what the sentencing judge
described as an "egregious act against the rule of law in the United
States."
"I consider Mr. Hale to be extremely dangerous," the judge, James T.
Moody of Federal District Court, said in imposing the maximum
sentence.
The crime, Judge Moody said, "undermines the judiciary's central role
in our society and strikes at the very core of our government."
Mr. Hale, 33, leader of a white power movement now called Creativity,
was found guilty of soliciting his security chief, an F.B.I.
informant, to kill Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, who was presiding over
a trademark case involving his group's use of the name World Church of
the Creator. The police focused on Mr. Hale's followers after Judge
Lefkow's husband and mother were murdered in their home Feb. 28, but
10 days later a litigant unconnected to the movement, Bart A. Ross,
confessed to the killings and committed suicide.
Acting as his own lawyer in a courtroom under extraordinary security,
Mr. Hale made an anguished, rambling plea Wednesday for a shorter
sentence, repeatedly declaring his innocence, asserting that he and
Judge Lefkow were "on the same side" and suggesting that his
high-profile prosecution might be partly responsible for Mr. Ross's
"horrible crime against her family."
"What if these people are dead today because of these liars?" Mr. Hale
asked, turning to face the prosecutors and F.B.I. agents seated behind
him. "What if this guy thought to himself, 'I'm not the only one who
wants her dead'?"
In a two-hour speech, Mr. Hale, who graduated from law school but was
denied admission to the bar because of his racial views, quoted Thomas
Jefferson, invoked Latin legal phrases, recited a couplet from "The
Star-Spangled Banner" and stopped several times to swallow a sob. He
attributed his conviction to his lawyer's shortcomings, insisted that
he had refused the informant's overtures toward violence, compared the
F.B.I. to the Gestapo and said he would rather be sent to a Siberian
work camp than return to solitary confinement and "die in a hole."
"If she's here, if somebody could please tell her, tell this poor
woman it's a lie," Mr. Hale said of Judge Lefkow, who did not attend
the hearing.
"What punishment is appropriate for the innocent?" he asked. "I should
be home by now. I should be apologized to."
Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney for the Northern
District of Illinois, denounced Mr. Hale as a domestic terrorist, and
took particular offense at the suggestion that his office was in any
way responsible for Mr. Ross's criminal acts.
"He shows he's not man enough to take responsibility for what he did,"
Mr. Fitzgerald said at a news conference after the hearing. "I put no
stock in his claims, now crocodile tears, that he didn't do anything
wrong."
Judge Lefkow, who has not yet returned to work, said in a telephone
interview that she had skipped the sentencing so as not to distract
attention from the proceedings, and that she spent the afternoon at
the Chicago Police Department, thanking the officers who investigated
the murders. She declined to respond to Mr. Hale's comments, saying
only: "I respect the judge's decision. I'm sure that he took all the
factors into account and made a fair decision."
Asked how she was doing, Judge Lefkow replied: "Carrying on day by
day. I stay busy during the day; I have a lot to do. Sometimes
nighttimes are harder."
Mr. Hale's mother, Evelyn Hutcheson, cried several times during her
son's statement, declaring after the hearing, "Matt is the only one in
that damn room who told the truth."
In addition to the metal detectors in the courthouse lobby, a second
metal detector and a bomb-sniffing dog were outside Courtroom 1903,
where Judge Moody, of the Northern District of Indiana, was sitting so
as to avoid the conflict of a colleague of Judge Lefkow. At least four
extra armed guards were inside..
Mr. Hale spoke passionately about growing up as the son of an East
Peoria, Ill., police officer who never let him touch his badge lest he
tarnish it. He said his graduation from the Southern Illinois
University law school and Judge Lefkow's granting of the motion he
wrote urging dismissal of the trademark case were the best days of his
life. Judge Lefkow's decision was overturned on appeal, but Mr. Hale
emphasized that she had originally supported his side, saying he had
hardly wanted to kill her but had instead been looking forward to
arguing a new motion before her.
He went over and over details of e-mail messages and taped
conversations between himself and his security chief, arguing that in
discussing the "Jew rat" he was referring to prosecutors, not Judge
Lefkow, who is Episcopalian, and quoting himself as saying, "I cannot
be a party to such a thing." Prosecutors contend that these
protestations were intended to provide Mr. Hale deniability and that
he nonetheless encouraged the security chief to act on his own.
"Mr. Hale is not concerned with actually taking someone's life, but
how to do it and not get caught," Judge Moody said in handing down the
sentence.
He called Mr. Hale "manipulative," "calculating" and "a highly
educated, intelligent individual who surrounds himself with troubled
individuals who feed his enormous ego."
While ignoring Mr. Hale's pleas for a shorter sentence, Judge Moody
did grant him two other requests: keeping him in Chicago's
Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he has an electric typewriter,
for six months so he can work on his appeal, and recommending that the
rest of his term be served in Pekin, Ill., near his parents' homes in
East Peoria.
----------------
Matthew Hale--American Martyr? by Andy Martin
http://www.politicalgateway.com/main/columns/read.html?col=328
AMERICA'S DAILY BRIEFING FOR APRIL 7, 2005
CONTRARIAN COMMENTARY BY ANDY MARTIN
MATTHEW HALE: AMERICAN MARTYR. JUSTICE WEEPS; WE SHOULD WEEP
(Chicago)(April 7) This is a difficult commentary to write. Matthew
Hale is a thoroughly despicable human being. The self-styled "white
supremacist" stands for everything I have lived my life against. As a
University of Illinois student I went to Springfield to support "open
housing" (Freedom of Residence). I worked for civil rights causes in
college and through law school, and every year since then. I belong to
a completely integrated, multicultural, multiethnic church. I condemn
racial or ethnic hatred of any kind.
But as a lawyer I know the law often makes grave mistakes. I
personally have been abused by corrupt judges and lawyers. Injustice
happens every day, to the innocent and the guilty alike.
With each passing day America is moving further and further away from
the democratic traditions which we espouse and broadcast to the world.
We are adopting the totalitarian methods of our vilest adversaries.
America is becoming a dictatorship where any person can be falsely
accused, prosecuted into penury, and jailed for a "crime" he or she
did not commit.
Even the guilty are entitled to due process. As Justice Stewart on the
U.S. Supreme Court once wrote, "Even a thief is entitled to deny he is
a burglar." Justice is served not only in protecting the innocent but
also in meting out measured punishment to the guilty.
Matthew Hale's sentencing was a kangaroo court, a travesty of justice,
a joke and a disgrace to America. But rather than fighting
anti-Semitism and racism, the US. Government is in the process of
creating yet another martyr--to racism and anti-Semitism.
I admire and respect U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. He is as decent
and honorable man as ever occupied his office for the Northern
District of Illinois. But sometimes even decent human beings, honest
and honorable people, can be blinded by their own sense of rectitude
and revenge. That's where Contrarian Columnists come in.
Hale was accused of "soliciting the murder" of U. S. District Judge
Joan Lefkow. We saw only a few weeks ago how mistaken society could
be. Hale was suspected of being the orchestrator of the murder of
Lefkow's husband and mother. Hale protested his innocence. He was
innocent.
The punishment of Hale's parents, denying them visits with their son
for a year because he protested his innocence of the Lefkow murders
through them, is a disgrace to justice, worthy of the Soviet state
during its worse abuses. Worthy of China today. A few weeks ago, a
lawyer in New York was convicted of representing a vile client, who
was also held incommunicado. Now America stoops to punish parents
because they protested their son's innocence.
Hale protested his innocence again yesterday. But before we get to
guilt or innocence, before we ask what a just punishment would be for
Hale, we have to ask how any judge worthy of the name could allow
someone who has been incarcerated as a caged rat for a year, could
allow someone in that state of mind to rise and speak on his own
behalf.
Even if the court was constrained to permit Hale to speak, the court
failed to hear argument from an impartial attorney represented as
amicus curiae to speak on behalf of justice itself. No one who has
been caged and abused can reasonably be expected to be rational in a
proceeding where his life is at stake. That's why we have lawyers. The
legal profession and the law failed us today.
There was no basis to hold Hale incommunicado. He is a loathsome
individual, a thoroughly devilish human being. But as the Seventh
Circuit once wrote in a decision, "[A]lhough [he] might not win a
popularity contest in this circuit...he still retains the same
constitutional rights as every other defendant brought before this
bar." In like fashion, Hale has been crucified, in all probability for
a crime he did not commit. Injustice never extinguishes the flames; it
only fans the fires. That will likely be the outcome with Hale.
His followers know Hale was framed, railroaded, set up by an FBI
"informant." How many people have said, in the throes of angry
divorce, "I wish I could kill my spouse?" People say "I'm going to
kill you" every day. They are not being sent to jail for forty years.
We don't imprison actual murderers that long.
We were told antiterrorism laws were being passed to combat foreign
enemies, terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden; now they are being turned
on us. Who's next? Patriot Act, anybody? Whatever Hale is, and he is
not very much, he is not a terrorist.
Judge Moody, who sentenced Hale, wrote an epitaph for our judicial
system. He said he said Hale's conduct "strikes at the very core of
our system of government." No, sir, Judge Moody. Manufacturing crimes
and prosecuting people for manufactured crimes strikes at our
democracy. No, Judge Moody, your unprincipled sentencing of a bad man
is what really strikes at the very core of our system of government,
your imposing "antiterrorism" laws on a neighborhood lout is what
strikes at the heart of our Constitution.
Sadly, Hale may be a victim when he should have been the vanquished.
But in being made a victim by the divine majesty of the U. S.
Department of Justice, Hale has become the ultimate victor. He has
shown that what he claimed--though for the wrong reasons--was a
corrupt society, is indeed a corrupt society, where the FBI can
manufacture a crime, use a government-paid employee to orchestrate
that crime, and then jail someone with a life sentence for a "crime"
that the person never committed.
America today is in the business of making the innocent guilty. We are
creating gulags all around the world, where we exterminate helpless
prisoners, branding them as our perceived enemies, as though the mere
act of branding was a sufficient basis to extinguish a life, or
torture someone into oblivion. We absolve our perpetrators of these
crimes, obstruct investigations, and kill a little bit of every
American every time we tolerate such subhuman behavior by a nation
that should a light unto all nations.
As someone who has devoted a major part of his life to justice and the
judicial system, to fighting crooked judges, a corrupt legal system
and the wholesale imposition of injustice on the innocent, I can
attest that when we fail to protect the guilty, we endanger the
innocent. Hale is a bad person, but in protecting his rights we
protect our own.
We are all guilty of being complicitors as our heritage of Due Process
is slowly eroded by the pious platitudes of the Bush administration.
America is being diminished. We are too blind to see this happening,
too timid to admit and face reality.
Today, Osama Bin Laden was also a big winner. He is a hater too. He
won because our adversaries are not stupid; they can see what we do,
how we preach justice and democracy and yet allow our courts to be
controlled by political considerations. Our enemies know we have
confined the innocent, abused the innocent, and even murdered the
innocent, while frustrated that we cannot easily separate the guilty
from the innocent. So we kill them all, abuse them all, disgrace us
all.
Now, even China and Russia are emboldened to mock our history of civil
rights and civility. And they're right. We do not have a monopoly on
virtue.
Make no mistake, if Hale was guilty of the crime of which he was
accused, I would be the first to send him away. If someone is a
terrorist, I would be the first to seek harsh punishment, death if
necessary. But Hale is not alone. Since 9/11 we have tortured and
abused and falsely prosecuted or imprisoned thousands of people who
were not guilty of the crimes with which they were charged, or who
were not charged with any crime at all.
My experience has been that the judicial system is often capable of
sorting out excessive punishments. I am hopeful that when cooler heads
prevail, as they usually do on the 27th floor of the United States
Courthouse, the American people will obtain justice. Hale may be
worthy of some punishment, but not forty years in a gulag, not being
held incommunicado, not for terrorism, not for a crime he probably did
not commit. And not with his parents being harassed and abused by the
Attorney General of the United States.
I am ashamed. Not because Hale is innocent. But because the process of
justice has once again proven itself guilty.
----------------
Andy Martin is the nationally syndicated independent Contrarian
Columnist for Out2.com and also serves as chief national and foreign
correspondent for Out2.com. [Go to Out2.com, register a city, click on
Govt & Politics.] He is a civil libertarian who has formed an
exploratory committee to consider seeking the 2006 Illinois Republican
Party gubernatorial nomination. He has served as an Adjunct Professor
of Law and holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Illinois
College of Law.
Media contact (866) 706-2639 Comments? Suggestions? E-mail Andy at:
[41]AndyforIllinois at aol.com
--------------
Chicago Tribune: Hale gets 40 years for plot to kill judge
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0504070253apr07,1,6144440,print.story
5.4.7
By Matt O'Connor
Tribune staff reporter
White supremacist Matthew Hale was sentenced to 40 years in prison
Wednesday by a federal judge who called him "extremely dangerous" and
said his solicitation to murder U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow was
"an extreme, egregious attack against the rule of law."
Hale, his voice often cracking with emotion, maintained his innocence
during a rambling, two-hour speech, accusing the government of
manufacturing evidence, his former lawyer of incompetence and the news
media of defaming him.
At times almost theatrical in his long monologue, Hale quoted from
Thomas Jefferson, recalled how his father, a retired police officer,
instilled in him a respect for the law, and ended his remarks by
reciting a few lines from "The Star-Spangled Banner."
"I hope the day will come when Judge Lefkow knows this is a lie," said
Hale, acting as his own attorney, in a court ringed with security.
"This is a horrible miscarriage of justice."
But U.S. District Judge James T. Moody was unswayed and found--for the
first time in Chicago's federal court--that Hale's solicitation to
murder Lefkow was a crime of terrorism under federal sentencing
guidelines.
Moody then imposed the maximum 40-year term, saying Hale's wrongdoing
"undermines the judiciary's central role in our society and strikes at
the very core of our system of government."
A federal jury convicted Hale last April of soliciting his security
chief, secretly working undercover for the FBI, to kill Lefkow because
she ordered his supremacist group to change its name after losing a
trademark-infringement lawsuit.
Moody said Hale surrounded himself with troubled individuals to "feed
his enormous ego" and manipulated them "to do his dirty work."
"Mr. Hale had absolutely no qualms about taking the life of Judge
Lefkow and others as long as he could appear to not be involved and
had credible deniability," said Moody, a Hammond jurist who presided
over the trial because of the inherent conflicts of interest among
Lefkow's colleagues in Chicago.
Hale, 33, of Downstate East Peoria, faces at least 34 years in prison
before he would be eligible for release.
Lonnie Nasatir, Midwest regional director for the Anti-Defamation
League, said the long sentence for the "charismatic" Hale likely
represents a crushing blow for his group, now called the Creativity
Movement.
The sentence devastated Hale's parents. Outside the courtroom, his
mother, Evelyn Hutcheson, challenged a reporter to "actually tell what
Matt said in there because Matt is the only one in that damn [court]
room that spoke the truth."
"It's a very sad day for me," she said later.
At Hale's request, Moody recommended that he remain at the
Metropolitan Correctional Center for six months to assist in his
appeal, then be transferred to the federal prison in Pekin to be close
to family.
But attorney Thomas A. Gibbons, who is assisting Hale, said he
believes it's likely Hale will end up in a maximum-security prison,
perhaps in Florence, Colo., because of the length of the sentence, the
nature of his conviction and the fact he is incarcerated under special
administrative measures usually reserved for terrorist suspects.
Gibbons said he expects a major issue in the appeal would be Moody's
decision to allow some testimony at trial about the shooting spree of
Hale follower Benjamin Smith in 1999. Smith targeted minorities,
killing two, including former Northwestern basketball coach Ricky
Byrdsong, and injuring nine others.
In his remarks, Hale claimed that on a key undercover tape in which
the informant, Tony Evola, asked if he wanted to "exterminate the
rat," the two were discussing a male Jewish lawyer involved in the
trademark lawsuit, not Lefkow.
Hale maintained that authorities realized the problem, because four
days later, Evola sent him an e-mail discussing going after the
"female rat."
"The only person in my church who ever talked about violence was Tony
Evola," said Hale, the self-proclaimed Pontifex Maximus of the former
World Church of the Creator. "He did it so many times I got used to
it."
Hale went so far as to suggest that the government's fabricated case
against him may have inspired Bart Ross to kill Lefkow's husband and
mother in late February. The judge had thrown out Ross' medical
malpractice lawsuit last fall.
Lefkow didn't attend Wednesday's sentencing, but U.S. Atty. Patrick J.
Fitzgerald later called Hale's accusation "offensive" and "stupid" and
derided his claims of innocence, referring to his "crocodile tears"
during his courtroom remarks.
Fitzgerald said he believes the special administrative measures should
remain imposed on Hale, saying he remains a danger to solicit others
to do harm.
"I think anyone who seeks to kill by using their words to encourage
others poses a threat," Fitzgerald told reporters.
Hale declared--and authorities later confirmed--that the Metropolitan
Correctional Center banned his parents from visiting him for one year.
The ban is believed to be connected to his mother delivering a message
to the media from Hale during the investigation into the murders of
Lefkow's family.
Hale and his followers were the focus of investigators until Ross
confessed to the murders in a suicide note.
Hale sought leniency from Moody in part because of the restricted
contact he has with family and other inmates as a result of the
special administrative measures. "I'd rather be in Siberia," Hale
said.
He spoke of the "hell" of solitary confinement, locked up in a small
cell 23 hours a day, unable to hear "a bird chirp or see the sun shine
or to behold the stars or to hear voices you care about."
"They want me to die in a hole," said Hale, referring to the jailhouse
nickname for solitary confinement. "How on Earth could a 40-year
sentence be appropriate for this offense? Nobody was hurt."
"I should be going home today," said Hale, incarcerated since early
2003. "I should have gone home a long time ago."
Hale would have faced a maximum of 14 years in prison without Moody's
finding that Hale's crime amounted to an act of terrorism, said
Gibbons, Hale's standby counsel.
Authorities said Moody's ruling may be only the third time in the
country that a judge boosted a sentence because of alleged terrorism
ties.
In comments in court, Assistant U.S. Atty. M. David Weisman, who
prosecuted Hale, said Hale qualifies as a domestic terrorist. "He is a
terrorist because he speaks of violence and applauds violence against
racial and religious minorities in this country," Weisman said. "More
fundamentally, Matthew Hale is a terrorist because he would have
retaliated against an official of our government for her conduct."
As Hale delivered his monologue, three deputy U.S. marshals stood
close by and as many as a dozen others were posted elsewhere in the
courtroom.
Hale denied he hated Lefkow, noting she had originally ruled in his
favor in the trademark lawsuit brought by an Oregon church with a
similar name. An appeals court overturned her decision.
Hale, a law school graduage who was denied a license largely because
of his racist views, said he wrote the court papers that swayed Lefkow
to rule in his favor. "That was one of the best days of my life," he
said.
Hale contended he sent an e-mail to followers seeking Lefkow's home
address only because he planned to organize a demonstration outside
her home if she held him in contempt for violating the court order to
change his group's name.
"There's a heck of a difference between a street demonstration and a
murder," Hale said.
But in his ruling, Moody said that days earlier, Hale had issued
another e-mail to followers that called Lefkow's ruling "a sick,
draconian order that in effect places our church in a state of war
with this federal judge."
If the church's constitutional rights were violated, "we can then
treat them like the criminal dogs they are and take the law into our
own hands," Hale wrote. "It will be open war on the Jews."
- - -
U.S. District Judge James T. Moody in sentencing
Matthew Hale to 40 years in prison:
"Mr. Hale is a highly educated, intelligent individual who
surrounds himself with troubled individuals who feed
his enormous ego. He is also very calculating and highly
skilled in controlling and manipulating others . . . .
Mr. Hale's irrational belief that Judge Lefkow's ruling
represented the use of force and that he could then declare
her a criminal and ask others to murder her is not only
frightening and troubling, but it undermines the judiciary's
central role in our society and strikes at the very core of our
system of government. It is imperative that judges be able
to perform their duties without fear of reprisal from people like
Mr. Hale attempting to take their lives. I consider Mr. Hale to
be extremely dangerous and the offenses for which he
stands convicted to be an extreme, egregious attack
against the rule of law in the United States. Mr. Hale's
conduct impacts the very fabric of our judicial system and the
ability of judges to function in a safe environment."
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