A pair of Georgia militia members convicted of a domestic terror plot to deploy ricin in U.S. cities each received 10-year sentences on Friday.
The New York Times reported that Samuel J. Crump, 71, and Ray H. Adams, 58, avoided life terms for charges connected to their anti-government scheme. They were arrested in 2011, along with two others, and were charged earlier this year.
Investigators said the men belonged to a fringe militia group and had devised a half-baked plan to poison several American cities in a stand against the federal government.
The pair had stored several containers of castor beans, which can be used to make ricin, with plans to harvest the poison and release it in five cities, including Washington, D.C. the Times reported.
“You take a pound of that (unintelligible), get upwind, up around Washington, DC, get about 20,000 feet (in an airplane), and turn that shit loose, it’d cover the whole (unintelligible) of Washington,” Crump said, according to investigators.
The septuagenarian later handed off one of the containers to an undercover FBI informant.
“This is not some laughing old guys talking kind of thing,” Judge Richard W.Story told the defendants on Friday, as quoted by the Times. “We’re talking about conduct that could have hurt innocent people if you had been able to carry it out.”
“I would not have hurt anyone,” said Mr. Adams, who stored the containers in his own home, according to the Times. “I get angry at the government sometimes, but no more than anyone else.”
Two other members of the militia in 2012 were each sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to related charges.
You can’t cure Stupid.
Well, they’re a pack of mangy malevolent idiots and I’m perfectly happy for them to rot in jail. But I’d be even happier if there were some way for them to sue or at least criticize the media hucksters who gave them all these ideas about the direness of our supposed national freedom-losing crisis in the first place. Those people ruin lives this way and never pay a price.
“I get angry at the government sometimes, but no more than anyone else.”
No - that’s a lot more than anyone else. Ordinary people don’t plan to murder citizens and take steps to complete that plan.
Gitmo for these terrorists.
“I get angry at the government sometimes, but no more than anyone else.”
Because, in his anti-gov’t bircher-addled mind, living one’s life in a constant state of apoplectic fury at the federal gov’t is actually the base-level starting point, the zero on the dial. Now that he’s going to Club Fed, he’s suddenly very sorry he spent a couple years with it turned up to 11.