Funny how they usually call Bill the self-proclaimed leader of ANSWP, yet, the next day, they are willing to (pretend to) believe that he had this “community” willing to go out and kill on his instructions.
They are lying about his Overthrow audience/ don’t even know his audience.
No matter what Bill wrote, the Overthrow readers did not harm anybody.
In fact, if anybody was going to be killed due to something Bill wrote, it probably would have been Bill White. The stuff he wrote about the other white nationalists made his targets loathe HIM.
And, his audience was not that loyal. By 2008, Bill had lost quite a bit of it, in part due to having lost his server and being offline of six months or so before he got his own servers.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
The Roanoke Times
Matt Chittum
Roanoke neo-Nazi activist William A. White already saw his time in prison extended once this week, and now he’s facing more time in a Chicago case in which he’d been previously acquitted.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Friday reinstated a 2011 conviction for soliciting violence against a juror who had helped convict a fellow white supremacist in Chicago years earlier. White’s case was sent back to U.S. District Court in Illinois so he can be sentenced.
He faces 10 years in prison on that sentence, on top of 2 1/2 years he’s already served for a conviction in Roanoke, as well as an additional three months he received Wednesday in the Roanoke case.
White was convicted by a Chicago jury in January 2011 based on evidence that the one-time Roanoke landlord and founder of the American National Socialist Workers Party used his website to write that “[e]veryone associated with the Matt Hale trial has deserved assassination for a long time,” and to later post the home address and mobile, home and work phone numbers of the jury foreman. Hale was the former leader of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator. He was convicted in 2004 of soliciting the murder of a federal judge in Chicago and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Judge Lynn Adelman, however, reversed the jury’s verdict several months later, ruling that White’s speech was protected by the First Amendment.
The government appealed the case, and White filed a cross appeal. The case was argued in June. Neither prosecutors in the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office nor White’s legal counsel there could be reached for comment Friday.
According to evidence presented at White’s original trial in Chicago, White in September 2008 posted on his now-defunct Overthrow.com website an article titled “The Juror Who Convicted Matt Hale.” The post described the jury foreman, Mark Hoffman, as a gay Jew with a black lover and “ties to professional anti-racist groups,” and included Hoffman’s personal contact information.
Adelman ruled that the statements, even when considered in light of other statements White made on Overthrow.com, weren’t solicitations, and because the prosecution had not proved criminal intent, the post about Hoffman was protected free speech.
The appeals court, however, found the context in the case compelling. The opinion cites other statements White made. In one example, White wrote an Internet post about a Canadian civil rights attorney titled “Kill Richard Warman.” He also said of Warman on a radio show, “this bastard has lived way too long. If somebody wants to kill him, here’s his address.” [HEY, WAIT A MINUTE, THAT WAS THE ROANOKE CASE. BILL WHITE ALREADY WAS TRIED FOR THAT, AND THE JUDGE DISMISSED THE CHARGE.]
In other examples cited by the court, White shared addresses of six black teens charged with attempted murder in Louisiana [NOTHING HAPPENED TO THEM]and published the address of well-known author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel [AFTER SOMETHING ALREADY HAPPENED TO HIM].
The post about Hoffman, taken in the context of White’s similar posts [WHERE NOTHING FOLLOWED], could lead a rational jury to see the Hoffman post as a solicitation, the appeals court ruled. [MAKING NO SENSE WHATEVER.]
“The post attributed to Juror A [Hoffman] characteristics intended to make the target loathed by readers of White’s neo-Nazi website,” the court wrote. [JUST BECAUSE YOU LOATHE SOMEBODY DOESN’T MEAN YOU ARE GOING TO TRY TO ASSASSINATE THEM.]
The jury could not be expected to ignore that “readers of Overthrow.com were not casual Web browsers, but extremists molded into a community [PROVE IT] by the internet — loyal and avid readers who, whether or not they remember every specific solicitation to assassination, knew that Overthrow.com identified hateful enemies who should be assassinated,” the opinion says.[BOY, THIS IS REALLY OVER THE TOP. WE KNEW WE SHOULD ASSASSINATE ALL THESE PEOPLE, BUT, WHAT HAPPENED? WE FORGOT TO DO IT?]
That White didn’t solicit the help of a particular assassin didn’t bother the [KANGAROO] court.
“It was unnecessary to do so given the very nature of the solicitation — an electronic broadcast which, a reasonable jury could conclude, was specifically designed to reach as many white supremacist readers as possible so that someone could kill or harm” Hoffman, the opinion reads. [THIS IS WHERE THAT BRANDENBURG RULING COMES IN. HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO GO THROUGH THIS?]
Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor, said the ruling is remarkable for running against the recent trend on First Amendment cases in federal courts.
“The Supreme Court’s gone a long way toward expanding the First Amendment, especially in the corporate context of late — and in other areas, too,” he said. “Yet there’s a line that’s drawn.” [IT’S CALLED ‘THE BILL WHITE LINE’]
The context of speech can be central to whether it’s protected, he said, citing the classic example that you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. [WHICH HAS NO COMPARISON WHATSOEVER TO THIS CASE]
Tobias said he doubts that the U.S. Supreme Court would consider the case should it be appealed, but he believes that it could be important for defining the law “in a very narrow number of circumstances.” [IMPORTANT FOR SHUTTING DOWN FREE SPEECH THE FEDS/SPLC DON’T LIKE]
Meanwhile, White is already back in prison.
He had already served his sentence for a conviction in U.S. District Court in Roanoke on similar charges to those in Chicago.
Among other things, he sent intimidating letters to tenants of a Virginia Beach apartment complex who filed a housing discrimination lawsuit against their white landlord.
The letters, addressed to “Whiney Section 8 N—–,” called them “dirty parasites” and warned that the white community’s “patience with you and the government that coddles you runs thin.”
But in March, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered that White be re-sentenced — because at least one of the tenants had young children, it ruled, the judge should have considered giving White an enhanced sentence for targeting especially vulnerable victims.
White was on parole at the time and living in Rockbridge County, and he bolted for Mexico when his court date neared.
He was sentenced to 10 months for the parole violation earlier this year.
On Tuesday, he appeared in federal court in Roanoke where Judge James Turk, following the appeals court’s directive, added three months to his original sentence.
It was unclear Friday when White would return to Chicago for sentencing there, or if he would attempt an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. [WHITE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW ABOUT THIS UNTIL THIS MORNING]