FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) - A panel of federal appeals court judges discussed at a Wednesday hearing the possibility of throwing out a solicitation to commit murder conviction for a former Fairbanks militia leader.
Schaeffer Cox, an advocate for gun rights and the anti-government sovereign citizen ideology, was convicted in 2012 of nine felonies, including conspiracy to commit the murder of federal officials. The solicitation conviction was one of the most serious.
The judges directed especially close attention at the hearing to the details of an armed security team Cox created to protect himself when he gave an interview at North Pole television station KJNP in 2010.
Cox, who was sentenced to serve nearly 26 years in prison, says he believed a team of federal assassins from Aurora, Colorado, had been dispatched to kill him and instructed his security team to be prepared to kill if the agents tried to kill him. No such “assassins” existed, although at this time, two FBI informants had spent months following Cox and recording their conversations with him.
“The government cites no case, and there is no law establishing that if a defendant has a paranoid fantasy that federal agents are attempting to assassinate him, then his efforts to defend himself against those phantoms amounts to a plot to murder federal officials,” Cox’s attorney Micheal Filipovic stated in a written brief in advance of oral arguments.
The three judges appeared to accept this argument Wednesday. U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Clifton asked a hypothetical question comparing Cox’s case with a solicitation to kill Mickey Mouse, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports (https://bit.ly/2i7Gcgu ).
Circuit Court Judge Milan Smith Jr. asked trial prosecutor Steve Skrocki to cite another murder soliciation case similar to the Cox case.
Skrocki said he could not.
Although the KJNP interview in Cox’s case involved “fictional” federal agents, other parts of the case against do name specific intended victims, including employees of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration.
Even if the court reversed Cox’s solicitation conviction, the conviction on conspiracy to commit the murder of federal officials would remain, as would the lesser convictions on weapons-related charges.
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Information from: Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner, https://www.newsminer.com
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