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April 30, 2004/Iyar 9 5764, Vol. 56, No. 32
Hale guilty, community relieved
CINDY SHER and
MINDA BLOCK
JUF News
CHICAGO - White supremacist leader Matthew Hale - whose rhetoric of "racial holy war" was tied to a deadly shooting spree directed at Jews and other minorities five years ago in Chicago - was found guilty April 26 by a federal jury in Chicago for seeking the murder of a federal judge.
Hale, who had been the director of the former Illinois-based hate group World Church of the Creator, was convicted on four of the five counts against him - one of solicitation for murder and three of obstruction of justice.
The jury's verdict, an-nounced in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge James Moody, came after three days of deliberations.
Hale had been charged twice with soliciting the murder of U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow because she had ordered him to stop using the name World Church of the Creator, which had been trademarked by an Oregon-based religious group with no ties to Hale.
Though Lefkow is not Jewish, in an e-mail letter to his followers regarding the trademark case, Hale refers to Lefkow as the "judge with the Jew surname." Tapes played during the trial documented the hate-filled views that, prosecutors said, provided a context for Hale's intent to commit violence.
"It is not surprising that a person possessed by the kinds of beliefs that Hale has actively promoted for years would ultimately act on them," said Michael C. Kotzin, executive vice president of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Fed-eration of Metropolitan Chicago.
Kotzin applauded law enforcement and prosecutors "for successfully taking action against Hale for the crimes which he did commit and for preventing the crimes which he was planning to commit."
Moody did not announce a sentencing date. Hale could receive a maximum of up to 50 years in prison.
Hale's defense will appeal the case, according to chief defense counsel Thomas Anthony Durkin.
In July 1999 one of Hale's followers, Benjamin Smith, went on a shooting rampage targeting minorities in the Chicago area.
He began the spree wound-ing six Jewish residents who were walking from synagogue on a Friday evening in the usually tranquil and heavily religious Jewish Chicago neighborhood of West Rogers Park.
By the time law enforce-ment officials caught up with Smith two days later in downstate Salem, Smith had injured nine people and shot to death two people - Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdson, a black man killed while walking in his Skokie neighborhood with his children; and Won Joon Yoon, a graduate student from South Korea who was fatally shot outside his church in Bloomington, Ind.
Michael Messing, the first individual targeted but not hit by Smith, said the verdict sends a strong message to anti-Semites and bigots that their hateful and evil activities will not go unpunished."
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