Unless circumstances change in Chicago, white supremacist blogger Harold “Hal” Turner of North Bergen will remain in federal custody pending trial on charges of threatening to kill three judges.
“I’m not persuaded the defendant is not a danger to the community,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael A. Shipp said during a hearing this morning in Newark.
The day after Turner was ordered detained, he delivered a 9-minute audio statement to listeners from the Essex County Jail, federal prosecutors told the judge. In that statement, they said, he identified three FBI agents who are likely to testify against him.
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Turner, 47, now will be sent to Chicago, where the judges preside whose photographs, phone numbers, work addresses and room numbers he included on his site, along with a photo of the building in which they work and a map of its location.
"Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed,” Turner wrote on the site. (For more, go to: Hate mongerer arrested again.)
FBI agents said they found 200 rounds of ammunition and 150 illegal hollow-point bullets, along with firearms, while arresting him at his North Bergen home last week, two days after he was arraigned in a similar case in Connecticut.
There, he is charged with advocating assaulting state legislators. (See: Hal Turner: How far is too far?)
Turner and his lawyers have argued that this is a First Amendment issue, pure and simple. But federal prosecutors today cited one of Turner's earlier postings as proof that he means business:
“Everybody can be gotten to. John F. Kennedy proved that. What are a few lives in the grand scheme of liberty? It just takes some guys with the balls to do it.”
Comments
July 1, 2009
Hello Mr. DeMarco - hope this finds you well.
My name is Floyd Cochran, I reside in Pennsylvania. To make a long story short in the summer of 2007 Hal Turner Internet broadcaster and blogger publicly attacked me by name and threatened to have me assaulted by his thugs. Yet when I turned over the audio of Turner making this threat nothing happen - I called the FBI, NJ Law Enforcement, Pennsylvania Attorney General and was told Hal couldn't be prosecuted even with the support of the Southern Poverty Law Center we were unsuccessful. In the spring of 2008 the Southern Poverty Law Center in a article about Hal Turner they write about the threaten directed at me. Here is an excerpt from the SPLC article:
Hearing that anti-racist activist Floyd Cochran was visiting Newark, near his home town, last June, Turner said he had "arranged for a group of guys to physically intercept" Cochran and added that Cochran would likely "get such a beating that his next stop is going to b
Hal Turner has boxed himself in. True, he has a right to free-speech (which includes making non-imminent threats). True, his targets have done some raunchy things. But, anyone who might defend Turner's free-speech, in the midst of all the threats, would, under guilt-by-association, be open to an accusation of making or condoning the same threats. It would be an imposition for Turner to demand such complicity and unwise for any patsy to get entangled in it.
Turner will probably get off (if he doesn't cop a plea), eventually, on account of free-speech. But, anybody, who aspires to amount to anything more than Lee Harvey Oswald or John Brown, would do well to steer clear of him.
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