SENT LETTERS CONTAINING THREATS OF VIOLENCE AND RACIAL SLURS
A Kentucky woman (55) was sentenced to 9 years in prison (followed by 3 years of supervised released) for using the U.S. Postal Service to send an interracial couple (and their children) “threatening communications.” Among other things, the missives are said to have contained “threats of violence and racial slurs.”
Following a jury trial (in March), the woman was convicted of “five counts of mailing threatening communications” to her neighbors due to their “actual or perceived race or color.”
In a written statement, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, noted, “This sentence sends a clear message regarding our commitment to ending hate-motivated violence and threats of violence …. There is no room in civilized society for violent threats based on race. We hope that this result brings some measure of peace to victims who had to suffer through the defendant’s terrifying threats of racial violence.”
Was that the letter of the law?
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