NORTH BERGEN – After being convicted of threatening the lives of three U.S. federal judges based in Chicago, Harold “Hal” Turner, a white supremacist shock jock and blogger, has asked for a new court-appointed counsel so he can appeal the decision, according to published reports.
U.S. District Judge Donald E. Walter presided over the three trials. The first two resulted in a mistrial, while in the last a jury arrived on the guilty verdict.
The charges against Turner stemmed from posts on his blog, in which Turner, of North Bergen, said the judges deserved to die because they upheld local gun ban laws. During the trial, Turner claimed that he was a “confidential source” for the FBI that was asked to up the ante on his website so the government could gain information on white supremacists, said published reports.
According to those reports, Turner wrote a letter from his cell at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn stating that Walter abused his legal authority and that both prosecutors and his own public defenders did not correctly follow the law. “If [that] wasn’t bad enough, you willfully concealed from all three juries in all three trials, a ‘blanked letter of declination’ issued by the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey [my home state’ which says I would not be prosecuted for anything I said on my radio show or anything I published on my website because I was trained by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and knew the legal limits of protected speech,” Turner said.
Turner faces up to 10 years in prison and a $25,000 fine at his sentencing on Dec. 3. – Tricia Tirella