Hulon Mitchell Jr. arrived in Miami in 1979 and built a religious movement there that claimed a real estate empire and drew praise from the city's civic leaders. He took the name Yahweh ben Yahweh, and many of his followers lived and worked in the group's Miami headquarters, the Temple of Love. In May 1992, after a trial of nearly five months in Fort Lauderdale, a federal jury found him guilty of a single count of racketeering conspiracy. The racketeering acts behind that count included fourteen homicides, two attempted homicides and an arson, all carried out by his followers in South Florida between 1981 and 1986.
The verdict was narrower than the charge sheet. Mitchell was never tried for murder in federal court, and the jury that convicted him of conspiracy could not agree on the substantive racketeering count, on which the judge declared a mistrial. An extortion count was dismissed before it reached the jury. He was sentenced to 18 years. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the conviction in 1996, holding that he had ordered his followers to kill and knew those orders would be carried out. He was released on parole in 2001 under conditions that barred him from contact with the movement he had founded, and he died in May 2007.
Mitchell was born in Enid, Oklahoma. In 1979 he moved to Miami. With a woman who became his closest associate, he founded the group the federal courts would later call the Yahweh organization, whose members were known as the Yahwehs. He took the name by which he was known for the rest of his life. He urged his followers to give up their outside jobs and move into the Temple, and many did.
The co-founder handled the Temple's money and its public relations, and the Eleventh Circuit later described her as his right hand. A guard unit called the Circle of Ten protected the Temple, which also housed the group's businesses. The appeals court was careful to note that many members of the movement had no part in any violence, and that adherents who never joined in illegal activity were not implicated by the case.
At the center of the federal case was a small and secret group inside the movement, which its members called the Brotherhood. The Eleventh Circuit described it as the unit that carried out Mitchell's orders, including orders to kill, and called it the hub of the conspiracy. Its meetings were attended by Mitchell himself, by several of the men who later stood trial beside him, by the man who became the government's main witness, and at times by the co-founder.
Two kinds of killing ran through the case. Some were directed at people inside the movement or recently gone from it, members who had left or who were punished to enforce discipline. Others, the court found, were directed at white people chosen because of their race, and the appeals court held that the evidence of racial hostility was properly admitted to show motive.
The indictment set out nineteen numbered racketeering acts of murder, attempted murder, extortion and arson. One was dismissed before trial and another during it. The rest, as the Eleventh Circuit recited them, began with an attempt on the life of a man who had left the group, an attempt that failed.
Aston Green died at the Temple in Miami. His death was the first homicide on the list.
Carlton Carey died in the Miami area in 1981 in the same incident in which a woman who had also left the sect survived an attempt on her life. Both had broken with the group, and both, prosecutors said, were targeted for it. The survivor could not identify the men responsible, and the case against them was built from other evidence, including the account of a former girlfriend of one defendant, who testified about what he had told her.
Leonard Dupree died inside the Temple. The Eleventh Circuit found that the co-founder was present and locked the doors, a finding it relied on in upholding her own conviction.
Glendell Fowler and Kurt Doerr died in Coconut Grove, in Miami. The same follower who later became the government's main witness was responsible for both deaths.
The ninth act was an arson in Delray Beach, north of Miami. After residents of a neighborhood there clashed with members of the group, followers set fires in the neighborhood. The court found that the co-founder helped to carry out that act.
Clair Walters, James Myers and Lyle Austin Bellinger followed on the list. Raymond Kelly died in September 1986 in the Miami area. Cecil Branch, Harry Byers and Reinaldo Echevarria were the subjects of the next three acts, each a homicide committed by a follower of the sect.
The last two homicides came out of a property dispute. In October 1986 the group was trying to buy a residential complex in Opa-locka, a city north of Miami. Anthony Brown and Rudy Broussard, who lived there, stood up to the group's members. The Eleventh Circuit found that Mitchell ordered their deaths, and both men died in Opa-locka that October.
Prosecutors described the full sweep of the case as fourteen killings, and the appeals court described the pattern of racketeering as spanning about five years.
The movement's public face was commercial. Mitchell lectured large audiences in the Miami area on how to move from poverty to riches, and he claimed to have built a real estate holding worth $100 million. Miami's civic leaders praised him, and the city's mayor declared a day in his honor.
The case against Mitchell was federal, and it was brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. A superseding indictment returned in the Southern District of Florida, the version that went to trial, named Mitchell and the co-founder together with seventeen followers. He was held in federal custody from his arrest through the trial, and by his release in 2001 he had been in custody for nearly 11 years.
Count I charged a RICO conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. § 1962(d): an agreement to conduct the affairs of the Yahweh organization through a pattern of racketeering activity. The nineteen racketeering acts listed under it were the murders, attempted murders, arson and extortion set out above. Count II charged a substantive RICO offense under 18 U.S.C. § 1962(c), the actual conduct of the enterprise's affairs through that pattern, and named Mitchell, the co-founder and nine followers. Count III charged Mitchell and the co-founder with extortion under the Hobbs Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1951.
None of the counts was a murder count. Under the conspiracy count the government had to prove that each defendant agreed to the enterprise's affairs being conducted through racketeering, and the killings were the acts that made up the pattern. The Eleventh Circuit later explained that the government needed to prove only that a defendant, by his words or actions, objectively showed such an agreement.
The trial was held in the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, before the chief judge of the Southern District of Florida. Sixteen defendants went to trial together: Mitchell and fifteen followers.
It lasted five months and ended in May. By the court's own count it occupied 75 trial days and about 444 hours in the courtroom, and the court's administrative office credited the presiding judge with a Category V criminal case under its assignment rules.
The government's main witness was a former member of the Brotherhood who testified about the Brotherhood and the killings; the appeals court recorded that he had killed six people at Mitchell's direction. The defense attacked his credibility at length and sought to call an expert to tell the jury he was a psychopath; the judge excluded that testimony, and the Eleventh Circuit later upheld the ruling, noting that expert evidence on a witness's credibility is generally inadmissible and that the jury had heard extensive cross-examination. Another witness, a former girlfriend of one of the defendants, described statements he had made implicating himself and another defendant in the 1981 incident involving the two former members.
One of the accused men was the subject of a competency hearing on February 24, 1992, and stayed in the case; he was later removed from the courtroom after the judge had warned him about his conduct, a step the Eleventh Circuit upheld without requiring the judge to try lesser sanctions first. Mitchell testified in his own defense. One defendant called a historian, who told the jury that the Yahweh faith was a true religion. Evidence of the movement's teachings came in over objection, on the ground that it showed motive and the leader's control over his followers, and the Eleventh Circuit later stressed that the Yahweh religion was not on trial.
During the trial the judge granted judgments of acquittal under Rule 29 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure on the extortion count, Count III, and on the last of the racketeering acts, so neither went to the jury.
The jury deliberated for about twelve hours before reporting that it was deadlocked. The judge found it too early for a supplemental instruction at that point, later gave the jury a modified version of the charge used to encourage deadlocked jurors to keep deliberating, and learned of the jury's numerical split only afterward, from a note the jurors sent without being asked. Deliberations lasted five days in all.
In May 1992 the jury returned its verdicts. Mitchell was found guilty on Count I, the RICO conspiracy. On Count II, the substantive RICO charge, the jury could not reach a verdict as to him, and the judge declared a mistrial on that count. Six followers were convicted with him on the conspiracy count. Seven were acquitted, and the jury failed to reach a verdict on two others.
The six convicted followers were the co-founder and five men. Each was convicted of the RICO conspiracy; three of the men were acquitted on Count II, and the co-founder and two others joined Mitchell in a mistrial on that count. They received sentences of 15 to 16 and a half years.
Because the racketeering acts predated the federal sentencing guidelines, which took effect on November 1, 1987, all the defendants were sentenced under the old system, in which the RICO conspiracy count carried a maximum of 20 years. The judge sentenced Mitchell to 18 years in federal prison and fined him $20,000.
Mitchell and six codefendants appealed to the Eleventh Circuit. On January 5, 1996, a panel affirmed their convictions in an unsigned opinion, rejecting every argument as without merit.
The court held that the Yahweh organization was a proper enterprise under the statute, that the racketeering acts were related and continuous enough to form a pattern, and that the slight connection to interstate commerce the law requires was shown. On Mitchell's own conviction it held that the evidence was sufficient: he had ordered his followers to commit numerous acts of murder, secure in the knowledge that his orders would be carried out. It upheld the co-founder's conviction on the evidence of her part in the Temple death and the Delray Beach arson.
The panel rejected the claims that the religious and racial evidence should have been kept out, holding that both were relevant to motive and control and that admitting them did not offend the First Amendment. It found no prosecutorial misconduct that prejudiced the defendants, no violation of the government's duty to disclose favorable evidence that changed the outcome, and no coercion in the supplemental instruction given to the deadlocked jury, which it described as a toothless tiger. It upheld the exclusion of the defense expert on the main witness, the admission of the former girlfriend's testimony, and the removal of one defendant from the courtroom after he had been warned. The Supreme Court of the United States denied review later in 1996.
Mitchell first came before the federal parole system in 1996. On August 6 of that year a parole examiner denied him release, and the United States Parole Commission upheld the denial on appeal.
In February 2001 he asked for emergency release. The government opposed the request, and it was denied. That May, a parole examiner recommended special conditions for his mandatory release, which was set for August 17, 2001. The conditions barred him from associating or having any contact with members of the group, directly or indirectly, in person or through the internet, the telephone or writing, in his residence, his work or his social life, without the prior written approval of his probation officer; barred him from working for the group or its members; and barred him from owning a computer with internet access without approval. They were to run until 2008, when his sentence would expire. The written conditions referred to the group by a label he considered offensive, and the court used the name Nation of Yahweh instead, noting that the Parole Commission had said it was willing to change the wording.
He challenged the conditions in federal court in Miami, arguing that they violated his religious freedom under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. On August 15, 2001, the district court denied his request for a preliminary injunction. It agreed that the conditions placed a substantial burden on his religious practice, but held that protecting the public was a compelling interest, that no narrower condition could separate law-abiding followers from others, and that the conditions were reasonably related to the purposes of parole.
His release was delayed for several weeks while he held out against the conditions and against a fine of more than $16,000 that he had to pay before going free. He was held in New York in the meantime. He paid the fine, accepted the conditions, and in late September 2001 was released from federal prison after serving nearly 11 years of his 18-year sentence. He returned to South Florida to live under close supervision.
The conditions held. In April 2006 the district court again denied him an injunction against them. In early 2007 his lawyer asked that the parole supervision be ended. He was released from parole shortly before his death, and he died in May 2007.
The conviction on Count I was a general verdict on a conspiracy. It established that Mitchell agreed to the conduct of the Yahweh organization's affairs through a pattern of racketeering, and the Eleventh Circuit found that the evidence showed he ordered killings, but the jury did not return a separate finding on each of the fourteen homicides, and he was never convicted of murder in any court.
The substantive racketeering count, which would have tied him directly to the conduct of the enterprise through the killings, ended in a mistrial for him rather than an acquittal, and it was not retried. The extortion count was dismissed during the trial.
Six of the fourteen deaths, those of Fowler, Doerr, Kelly, Branch, Brown and Broussard, were the work of the government's main witness, who carried them out at Mitchell's direction by the appeals court's account; the others were committed by other followers, and no court convicted Mitchell himself of any one of them.
1979: He moves to Miami and founds the Yahweh organization.
1981: Carlton Carey dies in the Miami area; a woman who left the sect with him survives.
September 1986: Raymond Kelly dies in the Miami area.
October 1986: Anthony Brown and Rudy Broussard die in Opa-locka after resisting the group's attempt to buy their residential complex.
Late 1980s: The movement draws praise from Miami civic leaders.
January to May 1992: The federal trial runs for five months in Fort Lauderdale.
May 1992: The jury convicts Mitchell of RICO conspiracy; mistrial on the substantive RICO count; six followers convicted, seven acquitted.
1992: He is sentenced to 18 years and fined $20,000.
January 5, 1996: The Eleventh Circuit affirms the convictions.
August 6, 1996: Parole is denied.
1996: The Supreme Court denies review.
August 15, 2001: A federal judge refuses to block his parole conditions.
September 2001: He is released from federal prison and returns to South Florida.
April 2006: A further request for an injunction against the conditions is denied.
May 2007: Mitchell dies.