Imprisoned for plotting to kill federal judge, law grad wants to play the violin in supermax
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Nearly a decade into his 40-year prison sentence for plotting to kill a federal judge in Chicago, law graduate Matthew Hale is finding the conditions of his solitary confinement in one of the country’s most secure prisons onerous.
The would-be Illinois lawyer, who was denied bar admission over his admitted white-supremacist views long before he came to the attention of the criminal justice system, filed a pro se federal lawsuit earlier this year alleging multiple civil rights violations. They included claims that prison officials at a federal supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, are improperly withholding Hale’s mail from him and have refused to accommodate the raw-food diet required by his religion, which is known as the Creativity Movement.
CBS Chicago reported on the civil rights litigation in April. What appears to be the text of the complaint Hale filed in federal court in Denver is included in a February post on Creativity Movement Toronto.
Since then, Hale, who is an accomplished violinist, offered to drop the case if the feds would allow him to play the instrument in his supermax cell, the Chicago Tribune reports.
The government refused the settlement offer, Hale says. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver, which is defending the civil rights suit, had no comment for the newspaper.
“It’s really the kind of hubris, stupidity, and downright sadism that one should expect from the federal government,” Hale said in a press release provided to the Tribune. “I suspect the defendants could not bear the thought of my actually enjoying myself by my being able to play my beloved violin in my prison cell.”
Hale and his mother, Evelyn Hutcheson, contend that he is not guilty of soliciting the murder of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow in a claimed plot that never came to fruition. They insist Hale was convicted based on manufactured and/or tainted evidence, the news articles say.
A malpractice lawsuit filed by Hale against his former legal counsel, who Hale also blames for his conviction, was dismissed in 2007.
A federal jury found Hale guilty in 2004 of asking his security chief, who was secretly cooperating with the FBI, to kill U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow. The alleged motive was Lefkow’s ruling in a trademark-infringement case that Hale’s Church of the World Creator had to change its name, the Tribune notes. An FBI press release and an archived Anti-Defamation League Web page provide details.
Hale apparently had no connection to a subsequent crime, the slaying of Lefkow’s husband and mother in the Lefkow family’s Chicago home in 2005. A disgruntled litigant in another case before Lefkow confessed prior to committing suicide. CNN and the Chicago Tribune reported on that case at the time.
See also:
ABA Journal (2005): “Keeping It Safe”
ABAJournal.com (2007): “After Murders, Judge Seeks ‘Resurrections’ “
