7 people go on trial this week for sedition and weapons charges; all are members of a group that call themselves the Hutaree Militia. They say their talk of killing police officers and overthrowing the government was innocent fun.
The group doesn’t deny that they talked of these things, which is prolly smart since the Feds have recordings that have been submitted into evidence. But attorneys for the defendants say they were just exercising their 1st (and 2nd) Amendment rights.
Hating someone and wanting to do harm to them is not, as far as I know, against the law. I can see them getting nailed on various weapons and explosives charges, but I don’t see a specific act of sedition cited in this account.
Nitpick: The first count of the indictment (pdf) is not sedition but “seditious conspiracy” as defined thus:
The indictment cites the defendants’ acquisition of weapons and “military-style training” as acts that furthered that conspiracy. I don’t think it’s all just about the statements made around the campfire.
There’s a separate question that I haven’t really seen raised: The charge accuses them of a conspiracy against federal authority, but the acts that it cites all seem to refer to plans to use violence against local law enforcement. I wonder if there’s enough of a federal hook here? Maybe in all those recorded conversations, there are also references to federal law enforcement, but I’m not sure that I see that in the indictment.
They had a pretty concrete plan to murder law enforcement officials. I suspect some will get off on the basis that they did not substantially assist the conspiracy (particularly since the underlying murder was prevented). I suspect Mr. Stone is SOL.
Thanks, Tom, for that link and for the info; all I knew is what I had read in AP stories when they were first arrested and then the story I linked in the OP.
I can understand the argument, and think it’s a potentially valid one. Except that prosecutors have over a hundred hours of videotape to pull evidence from, so it’s the defendants’ own words that are going to be used against them. For instance:
So that means the defense argument is going to come down to something like this:
Did that kind of thing work for the Montana milita group (the Freemen?) or the Texas militia group?
A quote in yesterday’s story brought up what I think is going to be an important question in this trial: does the government need to wait until violence occurs before it can bring the smackdown?
I note also that the defense is saying that the undercover agent facilitated some of the groups travel, etc. Did that make a difference in the trial of the guys who wanted to blow up the army base in New Jersey?
I’m not sure what it means exactly that the judge “granted requests for acquittal”; does that mean there was a trial and this is the verdict, or is it somehow (as it seems) different than that?
The prosecutors didn’t have any evidence that the Hutaree guys took any actions to back up their talk. The judge basically said, “Uh, dudes? You know that a ‘conspiracy’ requires people to actually do something, right?” When the prosecutors just kinda stared back blankly, with an oh-crap-I-knew-I-forgot-something expression, the judge thew out the charges.
