Nethercott, a 37-year-old member of Ranch Rescue, could get up to 20 years in prison on the weapons offense.

Nethercott is accused of assaulting Edwin Alfredo Mancia Gonzales, 26, last year while armed Ranch Rescue members were patrolling a ranch near here. Ranch owner Joe Sutton invited the paramilitary group to his property.

Ranch Rescue, Nethercott and Sutton are defendants in a civil lawsuit brought by the Center on behalf of Mancia and a Salvadoran woman who were attacked on the ranch. That case is scheduled for trial later this year.

White supremacist guilty of solicitation to murder
CHICAGO -- On April 26, white supremacist leader Matthew Hale was found guilty of trying to have a federal judge killed. In 1996, Hale restarted the white supremacist World Church of the Creator, one of whose members, Benjamin Smith, went on a murderous shooting spree in 1999 targeting minorities in the Midwest.

Hale, 32, was found guilty on four of the five charges against him, the most serious being solicitation of murder.

Prosecutors claimed Hale was furious after U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow ordered him to stop using the name World Church of the Creator for his organization because an Oregon-based multicultural religious group had trademarked it.

Prosecutors claimed that Hale asked one of his followers, Anthony Evola, who was Hale's chief of security and an FBI informant, to murder Lefkow. During the trial, jurors heard more than a dozen tapes of Hale using racial slurs, including one in which he joked at Smith's rampage.

Solicitation of murder carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Hale is scheduled for sentencing in August.

Islamic community seeks FBI help
MIAMI -- Incidents of vandalism and threats against South Florida's Islamic community in early May have prompted the FBI to get involved. Altaf Ali, executive director of the Florida Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, asked the FBI to step in after three incidents at Islamic institutions in Miami-Dade County and Pembroke Pines.

An FBI spokeswoman said the bureau has agreed to investigate. Over the May 8 weekend, the Masjid Ihsaan mosque in Perrine was broken into and ransacked. Three days later, a swastika and curse words were spray-painted at the Islamic School of Miami.

And the next day, a note was found at the Darul Uloom Institute, an Islamic Center in Pembroke Pines. The note read, ''Kill them all in the name of Allah.''

Judge Roy Moore speaks at extremist convention
VALLEY FORGE, Pa. -- Judge Roy Moore, 57, the recently ousted Alabama Supreme Court "Ten Commandments" Chief Justice, was to be featured as keynote speaker at the Constitution Party's national convention, held here June 26.

The Party is courting Moore as a presidential candidate. Moore's attorney and friend, Herb Titus, ran for vice president on the Constitution Party (then U.S. Taxpayer Party) ticket in 1996.

The Constitution Party, which was on 41 state ballots in 2000, is an extremist anti-government political party that believes all abortions should be banned, the "homosexual agenda" expunged, all taxes abolished and all immigration ended.

The party also advocates the application of "biblical law," meaning the creation of an essentially theocratic government that follows the Old Testament, something Moore agrees with.

In May, Moore spoke to the Missouri chapter of the party, his sixth presentation in a series of speeches he plans to give to state chapters, according to the Constitution Party's website.

Men arrested in grave desecration
JASPER, Texas -- On May 10, two white teenagers were charged with criminal mischief for desecrating the grave of James Byrd Jr., the black man dragged to his death from the back of a pickup truck by three white supremacists in 1998.

The men took Byrd to a country road, beat him, chained him to their truck by his ankles and dragged him more than two miles. Two of the men received the death penalty, and one was sentenced to life in prison.

Joshua Lee Talley, 19, of Jasper and John Matthew Fowler, 18, of Call, were each charged with one criminal mischief count related to the desecration. Racial slurs and profanities were etched into a steel plate on the vault of Byrd's grave, and his headstone was knocked over. The teens admitted vandalizing Byrd's grave and pushing over stones on the graves of two white people.

SPLC Report
June 2004