You couldn’t make these people up !
Law & Crime reports
Affirming the pre-trial detention of a white supremacist Army Reservist, the D.C. Circuit on Wednesday unanimously upheld a standard for keeping those charged with the breach of the U.S. Capitol locked up before trial.
Those defendants do not need to be charged with a crime of violence to be considered a danger to the community, the court ruled.
A Navy contractor at a weapons facility in New Jersey, Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli espoused a hateful ideology and violent fantasies, which are detailed at length in court papers. Prosecutors embedded photographs showing him posing with an Adolf Hitler mustache and sharing racist memes about Black people and Jews. When authorities searched his apartment, investigators found copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and neo-Nazi writer William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, the same tome that inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
In 2010, Hale-Cusanelli was arrested with three other people after one used a homemade PVC launcher—also known as a potato gun—to fire frozen corn cobs at a home in New Jersey. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. The gun was marked with the words “WIDOWMAKER” and “WHITE IS RIGHT” as well as with a drawing of the Confederate flag.
Despite the alarming rhetoric and symbols, U.S. Magistrate Judge Tonianne J. Bongiovanni, from the District of New Jersey, ordered Hale-Cusanelli’s conditional release on bail on Jan. 19.
The District of D.C.’s Chief Judge Beryl Howell quickly stayed that ruling pending review by U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who reversed the release order on March 23.
