[90880] in Cypherpunks
News of Jim Bell
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Young)
Tue Nov 25 10:19:08 1997
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 09:12:28 -0500
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Reply-To: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Anonymous forwarded three local news stories about Jim's
sentencing:
http://jya.com/jimbell6.htm
An excerpt:
In a hearing in U.S. District Court in Tacoma this morning,
Bell 's public defender and an assistant U.S. Attorney recommended
a 6-to-12-month jail sentence for Bell as part of a plea-bargain
agreement.
But federal probation officers recommended a sentence of 27 months.
In doing so, they said they were looking at the "totality" of Bell's
behavior, including the threatening nature of his Internet essay,
"Assassination Politics."
As a result, U.S. District Court Judge Franklin D. Burgess said he
was uncomfortable with the situation. "Somehow I am getting a feeling
that somebody knows more about something than I do," Burgess said.
Also reported: Jim had encrypted some of his files. And though "Bell
plead guilty to relatively innocuous charges" IRS investigators
compared him to The Unabomber and Tim McVeigh, and claimed he
was "part of a far darker scheme to assassinate IRS agents and
topple the U.S. government."
