Ohio Neo-Nazi’s Sentence on Weapons Charges Draws Criticism
An Ohio neo-Nazi who amassed a huge illegal stockpile of weapons, along with an apparent hit list of Detroit-area Jewish and African-American leaders, was given a six-year sentence Thursday by a federal judge in Toledo, Ohio. Civil rights leaders in Detroit, including one on the man’s list, expressed their outrage at what they saw as a light sentence.
Richard Schmidt, a 48-year-old with an earlier felony manslaughter conviction to his credit (he was found guilty of murdering a Latino man outside a bar in 1989), pleaded guilty in July to a variety of federal weapons charges. Even though he was forbidden from owning firearms by virtue of his record as a felon, Schmidt had amassed a cache of 18 guns, 40,000 rounds of ammunition, and a full complement of body armor.
That wasn’t all police found. The most chilling piece of evidence was a detailed list of civil rights leaders in the Detroit area: their home addresses, as well as other personal information. Additionally, his personal writings indicated that he intended “to assassinate members of religious and cultural groups based only on their race, religion and ethnicity and to broadcast those murders to like-minded supporters,” according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Duncan Brown, the chief prosecutor in the case.
“This defendant, quite simply, was a well-funded, well-armed and focused one-man army of racial and religious hate,” Brown wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
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