Court affirms sentence over threats to kill judge

A federal appeals court on Friday laid down the law on an Arkansas man who three years ago mailed a threat to kill and dismember a federal judge in Little Rock.

In upholding the maximum 10-year sentence imposed on Jeffrey S. Williams for mailing threatening communications, a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis said Friday that “the threats by Williams were particularly egregious, violent, and gruesome.”

Williams pleaded guilty to the charge March 5, 2015, admitting that while imprisoned two weeks earlier on state robbery and theft charges in the Arkansas Department of Correction, he sent a hate-filled letter to Chief U.S. District Judge Brian S. Miller. The letter announced that upon Williams’ release, he planned to get a gun, wait for Miller to come out of the courthouse and shoot him in the head.

“According to the letter, once Williams had dispatched Judge Miller, he intended to sodomize the corpse, chop it into pieces, and mail one piece of the corpse to the courthouse each week,” the opinion said. “After all the pieces were sent, Williams would blow up the courthouse.”

The opinion said Williams also told Miller, with whom he was angry for sentencing his brother to federal prison, to sleep with one eye open and urged him “to make peace with his god because he was going to die,” and warned him to get ready to “rot in hell.”

While Williams’ letter was particularly memorable, judges and staff members in Little Rock’s federal courthouse receive threats through the mail as a matter of routine, U.S. District Clerk Jim McCormack confirmed Friday.

“It’s not unusual to receive correspondence that contains threatening language,” McCormack said.

While some letters are worse than others, the question of whether any mailing constitutes a serious threat has to be determined by the U.S. marshal’s office and the U.S. attorney’s office, which is why McCormack always turns over such letters to the marshals, who he said will assess it, discuss the assessment with him and, if warranted, “escalate it.”

He said his “conservative estimate” is that a judge or a member of the court staff in the Eastern District of Arkansas receives a threatening letter every six to eight weeks.

Even though not all the letter-senders are prosecuted, “Everybody takes it very seriously,” McCormack said.

Noting that even if the sender is serving a life sentence, indicating he is unlikely to fulfill a threat, the letters are never ignored. “My practice is to immediately notify everybody,” he said.

When FBI agents interviewed Williams shortly after his letter arrived at the courthouse, he told them “that he was not playing and that if his brother were sent to prison, he meant everything he wrote in the letter,” according to the 8th Circuit opinion. “A second interview took place on March 19, 2015, and Williams again stated that he meant what he said in the letter. Specifically, Williams told the FBI, ‘I hope they keep me locked up because if not there likely to be some sh** when I get out.”

The judges noted that in 2013, Williams sent a letter to the FBI threatening to blow up the agency’s headquarters and kill the president, but “no charges were filed because the FBI and Secret Service determined he was joking.”

Williams was prosecuted for the letter to Miller in the Eastern District of Arkansas, headquartered in Little Rock, but by an assistant U.S. attorney in the Western District who didn’t practice before Miller, to avoid a conflict of interest. After he pleaded guilty, he was sentenced by one of Miller’s fellow judges, U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr., to the statutory maximum of 120 months, or 10 years, in federal prison — where parole is unavailable.

Moody granted the federal prosecutor’s request to impose a sentence above the 41- to 51-month penalty range recommended by federal sentencing guidelines, based on the particularly gruesome and violent nature of the threats and Williams’ “continued incorrigible behavior while incarcerated,” according to the opinion.

Not only did Moody sentence Williams to the maximum sentence allowed under the law, but he ordered the federal sentence to be served consecutively to Williams’ 20-year state sentence.

Williams appealed to the 8th Circuit, arguing that the sentence was unreasonable and that Moody abused his discretion by increasing the sentence based on the egregiousness of his conduct, saying the sentencing guidelines already accounted for that. But the 8th Circuit panel said the guideline range didn’t take into account the gruesome and violent nature of the threats.

“The district court did not abuse its discretion by finding that the guidelines did not fully account for the sentencing factors,” said the panel, consisting of U.S. circuit judges Roger Wollman of Sioux Falls, S.D., Jane Kelly of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Ralph Erickson of Fargo, N.D.

In a sentencing memo asking Moody to increase Williams’ sentence above the guideline range, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly D. Harris argued, “The defendant’s letter to Judge Miller is not only violent in nature, but also very detailed. … The defendant has yet to show any remorse for what he wrote.”

She outlined his extensive history of crimes and noted that he didn’t comply with the terms of his probation for even one year in his first felony case, committing several misdemeanors and a felony after only a few months, leading to his probation being revoked. After he was paroled, he committed the robbery and theft that led to his current incarceration, she said. She also cited 54 infractions he racked up while in prison.

“The defendant was given the opportunity to change the course of his life when he was given both probation and parole,” Harris wrote. “He failed to capitalize on these opportunities. … He was only four years away from his set release date on the robbery and theft commitment when he wrote the letter at issue to Judge Miller.”

The prosecutor cited a need to provide just punishment and to protect the public in requesting “a substantial upward variance from the advisory guideline range,” and asked that the federal sentence be imposed consecutively to the state sentence.