Fort Smith, Arkansas, Trial

In 1987, several prominent white supremacists, including key members of the Order, the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), were indicted on conspiracy charges. A year later, all were acquitted, striking a major blow to government efforts to root out domestic terrorism of the far right.

More than two dozen white supremacists were named in two separate indictments returned by grand juries in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in April 1987. Five men, including CSA member Richard Wayne Snell, were indicted for conspiring to murder a federal judge and an FBI agent. Ten others, including the chief of the Aryan Nations, Richard Girnt Butler, and two top Aryan Nations leaders, Louis Ray Beam, Jr., and Robert E. Miles, were indicted for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government by force.

The government maintained that the various conspiracies sprang from a July 1983 meeting of the Aryan Nations World Congress in Hayden Lake, Idaho. There, Butler, Beam, Miles, and the late Robert Jay Mathews, founder of the Order, allegedly discussed plans to create a separate white nation in the Pacific Northwest. Some of the 119 acts said to be part of the conspiracy include the firebombing of a Jewish community center in Bloomington, Indiana, the purchase of firearms and explosives in Missouri and Oklahoma, and the theft of more than $4 million from banks and armored cars in Washington State. The money was intended to fund the establishment of an Aryan nation; the bombings, murder, and sabotage were intended to disrupt society, with hopes of inciting a race war that would eventually topple the U.S. government.

The defense cast the case as a First Amendment issue, asserting that the defendants had rights of free speech and free association, and claiming that they were being persecuted by a Jewish-controlled government. In turn, the prosecution attempted to prove that Butler, Beam, Miles, Mathews, and others agreed to, and then engaged in, the conspiracies. The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of James Ellison, founder of the CSA, who turned government witness to lessen his existing prison term, as well as Kerry Wayne Noble, second-in-command of the CSA.

Ellison testified that he was present at two meetings in which the conspiracies were originated and discussed. He also claimed that, in December 1983, he participated in the plan to murder federal judge H. Franklin Waters and FBI agent Jack D. Knox. Waters and Knox were both involved in cases related to Gordon Kahl, a tax protestor who was known to several of the defendants and who had been killed by federal [Page 142]agents earlier that year. The plan was aborted after a traffic accident. Both Ellison and Noble testified that the white supremacist leaders planned to use the CSA compound in Arkansas for paramilitary training. Noble added that the murders would be used to incite “total insurrection across the United States.”

After seven weeks of testimony and four days of jury deliberations, on April 7, 1988, the jury found all the defendants not guilty, much to the disappointment of groups such as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which had lauded the initial indictments. (Many of those charged, however, were already serving prison sentences.)

The Fort Smith sedition trial followed three successful federal cases against white supremacists in the 1980s, and many had hopes that it would further hobble the movement. Critics of the government's case point to the weakness of Ellison's and Noble's testimony.

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