Jury finds White guilty on 4 counts: Neo-Nazi found guilty on charges of making threats, but acquitted on 3 other counts
— Roanoke Times Reports:
— “Done in by his own words, Internet hatemonger William A. White was convicted Friday of threatening people from Virginia Beach to Canada.”
— “The verdict, however, was not a total repudiation of White’s assertion that the First Amendment should protect his incendiary speech. Of seven counts against White, the federal jury acquitted him of three.”
— “White, who will be sentenced later, could face up to 35 years in prison.”
— “The self-proclaimed leader of a Roanoke-based neo-Nazi group, White was returned to the city jail late Friday afternoon as a snowstorm swirled around the downtown courthouse where, for the past week and a half, the jury heard testimony about how he used the Internet and other means to terrorize total strangers with whom he disagreed.”
— “However, White was found not guilty of making threats against Leonard Pitts, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald, and Charles Tyson, the former mayor of South Harrison township in New Jersey.”
— “In the case of Pitts, White told the columnist that he looked forward to the day when whites would rise up again and slaughter and enslave blacks. He also told an editor at the Miami Herald that he wouldn’t shed a tear if ‘some looney’ took the information from his Web site and killed Pitts.”