Amish guilty of hate crimes in Ohio beard-cuttings

CLEVELAND (AP) — Six­teen men and women who rejected lenient plea deals are fac­ing lengthy prison terms for their con­vic­tions in the hair– and beard-cutting attacks on fel­low Amish in Ohio.

The trial focused on an inter­nal Amish dis­pute and offered a rare and some­times lurid glimpse into the closed and usu­ally self-regulating com­mu­nity of believers.

The defen­dants, with about 50 chil­dren between them and includ­ing six cou­ples, were con­victed Thurs­day in U.S. Dis­trict Court after 4 1/2 days of deliberations.

The defen­dants had rejected plea deals which offered leniency, with some likely to face only pro­ba­tion. With the con­vic­tions, some defen­dants could now get sen­tences of 20 years or more.

Mem­bers of the defense team said appeals were likely and would focus on whether the beard-cuttings amounted to religious-based hate crimes.

Judge Dan Aaron Pol­ster sched­uled sen­tenc­ing for Jan. 24.

Pros­e­cu­tors planned to file a request Fri­day to revoke bond and lock up defen­dants who had remained free pend­ing trial. The judge asked the defense team to respond by Tuesday.

Rhonda Kot­nik, rep­re­sent­ing Kathryn Miller, said the ver­dicts would destroy the Amish com­mu­nity of about 25 families.

“The com­mu­nity is going to be ripped apart. I don’t know what’s going to hap­pen to all their chil­dren,” she said.

Samuel Mul­let Sr., 66, the leader of the break­away group, was found guilty of orches­trat­ing the cut­tings last fall.

The gov­ern­ment said the cut­tings were an attempt to shame mem­bers of Mullet’s com­mu­nity who he believed were stray­ing from their beliefs. His fol­low­ers were found guilty of car­ry­ing out the attacks, which ter­ror­ized the nor­mally peace­ful reli­gious set­tle­ment that aims to live sim­ply and piously.

Pros­e­cu­tors and wit­nesses described how sons pulled their father out of bed and chopped off his beard in the moon­light and how women sur­rounded their mother-in-law and cut off two feet of her hair, tak­ing it down to the scalp in some places.

Pros­e­cu­tors say they tar­geted hair because it car­ries spir­i­tual sig­nif­i­cance in their faith.

All the defen­dants are mem­bers of Mullet’s set­tle­ment that he founded in east­ern Ohio near the West Vir­ginia pan­han­dle. The Amish eschew many con­ve­niences of mod­ern life, includ­ing elec­tri­cal appli­ances and auto­mo­biles, and embrace their centuries-old roots.

Fed­eral offi­cials said the ver­dicts would send a mes­sage about reli­gious intolerance.

“The vic­tims in this case are mem­bers of a peace­ful and tra­di­tional reli­gion who sim­ply wanted to be left to prac­tice their reli­gion in peace,” U.S. Attor­ney Steven Det­tel­bach said. “Unfor­tu­nately, the defen­dants denied them this basic right and they did so in the most vio­lent way.”

Mem­bers of the Amish com­mu­nity who sat through the trial hur­ried into a hired van with­out com­ment­ing, some cov­er­ing their faces.

Defense attor­neys said the defen­dants were bewil­dered by the verdicts.

“They really don’t under­stand the court sys­tem the way the rest of us have, being edu­cated and read­ing news­pa­pers,” said Joseph Dubyak, whose client, Linda Schrock, has 10 chil­dren with her hus­band, who was also convicted.

The sus­pects had argued that the Amish are bound by dif­fer­ent rules guided by their reli­gion and that the gov­ern­ment had no place get­ting involved in what amounted to a fam­ily or church dispute.

Mul­let wasn’t accused of cut­ting anyone’s hair. But pros­e­cu­tors said he planned and encour­aged his sons and the oth­ers, mocked the vic­tims in jail­house phone calls and was given a paper bag stuffed with the hair of one victim.

One bishop told jurors his chest-length beard was chopped to within 1 1/2 inches of his chin when four or five men dragged him out of his farm­house in a late-night home invasion.

Pros­e­cu­tors told jurors that Mul­let thought he was above the law and free to dis­ci­pline those who went against him based on his reli­gious beliefs. Before his arrest last Novem­ber, he defended what he believes is his right to pun­ish peo­ple who break church laws.

“You have your laws on the road and the town — if some­body doesn’t obey them, you pun­ish them. But I’m not allowed to pun­ish the church peo­ple?” Mul­let told The Asso­ci­ated Press last October.

The hair cut­tings, he said, were a response to con­tin­u­ous crit­i­cism he’d received from other Amish reli­gious lead­ers about him being too strict, includ­ing shun­ning peo­ple in his own group.

Defense attor­neys acknowl­edged that the hair cut­tings took place and that crimes were com­mit­ted but con­tend that pros­e­cu­tors were over­reach­ing by call­ing them hate crimes.

Wit­nesses tes­ti­fied that Mul­let had com­plete con­trol over the set­tle­ment that he founded two decades ago and described how his reli­gious teach­ings and meth­ods of pun­ish­ments devi­ated from Amish traditions.

One woman tes­ti­fied that Mul­let coerced women at his set­tle­ment into hav­ing sex with him, and oth­ers said he encour­aged men to sleep in chicken coops as punishment.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Sep 21 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.