Leader of Amish sect guilty of hate crimes

Followers also convicted in beard-cutting cases

CLEVELAND— The domineering leader of a renegade Amish sect and 15 of his followers were convicted Thursday of federal conspiracy and hate crimes for orchestrating a series of bizarre beard- and haircutting attacks last fall that spread fear through the Amish of eastern Ohio.

The convictions of Samuel Mullet Sr., along with several relatives and followers, could bring lengthy prison terms. The verdicts were a vindication for prosecutors, who made a risky decision to apply a 2009 federal hate-crimes law to the sect’s violent efforts to humiliate rivals.

Defence lawyers had argued that the government was overreaching by turning a personal vendetta within the community into a hatecrimes case. But the jury accepted the prosecutors’ description of the attacks as an effort to suppress the victims’ practice of religion.

The victims “simply wanted to be left to practise their own religion in their own way,” said U.S. attorney Steven Dettelbach.“The defendants invaded their homes, physically attacked these people and sheared them almost like animals.”

Mullet, 66, and 15 followers were tried for their roles in five attacks last fall on nine people whom Mullet had described as enemies.

Although Mullet did not directly participate, prosecutors labelled him the mastermind of the assaults, in which groups of his followers invaded the homes of victims, threw them down and sheared their beards and hair. Men’s long beards and women’s uncut hair are central to Amish religious identity. Prosecutors argued the attacks were intended to humiliate those who questioned Mullet’s cultlike methods, such as forcing errant followers to live in chicken coops and pressing married women to accept his intimate sexual “counselling.” The testimony included an elderly woman’s account of her terror as six of her children and their spouses made a surprise late-night visit, with the men holding down her sobbing husband as they hacked off his beard and hair and the women cut her waist-length hair to above the ears as she prayed aloud.