The Tennessee man sentenced to 20 years in prison for recruiting people to burn down a Muslim community could get a significant chunk of his punishment tossed out after a federal appeals court decision.
In a recent opinion, U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals justices said a local federal judge, Curtis Collier, relied on older, and now abandoned, case law when he rejected Robert Doggart’s plea agreement in June 2015. That agreement would have sent Doggart, a former Tennessee Valley Authority engineer and 2014 congressional candidate, to prison for five years maximum for threatening Islamberg near Hancock, New York. Once it was rejected, federal prosecutors secured more charges against Doggart, who decided to fight them at an eight-day trial in February 2017 where a jury found him guilty on four counts.
Doggart, who wound up with a 20-year sentence instead, appealed his conviction in May, arguing that Collier shouldn’t have rejected that agreement. In a Oct. 18 ruling, U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey Sutton agreed and said the proper remedy is to send Doggart’s case back to Chattanooga to “re-evaluate the plea agreement under the correct definition of a threat.”
“Doggart suffered plenty of prejudice from this misreading of the statute,” Sutton wrote. “He was sentenced to almost 20 years in prison rather than the maximum of five years he would have faced had the court accepted his plea. To give Doggart the benefit of his bargain, we must remand the case to [Chattanooga] to re-evaluate the plea agreement under the correct definition of a threat.”
Nothing is set in stone yet.
Doggart, who is being held in a federal medical center in Kentucky and is scheduled to be released in 2033, would have to agree to the plea. From there, Collier gets to decide again whether to accept or reject it. Federal prosecutors declined to comment Wednesday, and Doggart’s appeal lawyer did not return a phone call.
“I wasn’t surprised the judge remanded the case after attending the appeals hearing and seeing how things were progressing and in light of the new case,” said Tahirah Clark, a lawyer and Islamberg member. “But there’s room for hope because [Sutton] didn’t overturn the convictions.”
At the heart of Doggart’s case are questions of prejudice and what constitutes a “threat.”
Members of the targeted Islamberg community say Doggart is a terrorist who tried to recruit “gunners” online to go with him to kill adults and children and destroy several buildings, including a mosque and a school, on the 70-acre community. At trial, prosecutors showed jurors numerous wiretapped phone calls in which Doggart detailed his plot and talked about getting a demolitions expert. Doggart first came to the federal government’s attention around February 2015 after a confidential informant noticed one of his Facebook posts. He was monitored and followed until his arrest that April.
Doggart’s defense attorneys countered their client suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder and didn’t have nearly the number of supporters he boasted. They said he never planned to carry out the attack, as evidenced by his lack of bags and supplies when the FBI raided his home. Doggart believed Islamberg planned to attack New York City or poison the Delaware River, a charge that law enforcement has said there’s no evidence to support.
After he was arrested in April 2015, Doggart, now 66, agreed to plead guilty to one count of interstate communication of threats. That charge was in reference to a March 6, 2015, call he made from Tennessee to the government’s informant in Texas. Prosecutors had Doggart on recording saying “those guys [have] to be killed. Their buildings need to be burnt down.”
But Collier didn’t accept it. He said the government failed to show Doggart’s speech intimidated others into furthering his plan to attack Islamberg and therefore wasn’t a true, objective threat.
According to previous orders and court records, Collier used a 1997 case that came out of the Sixth Court Circuit of Appeals to help make his decision. That’s not uncommon since the circuit creates precedent for courts in parts of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.
Known as United States v. Alkhabaz, that case says a threat requires that “a reasonable observer would understand the words (1) as a serious expression of an intent to harm and (2) to effect some change or achieve some goal through intimidation,” Sutton wrote.
But Sutton said a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 2015 dealing with threats made across state lines over social media has replaced Alkhabaz. That case, called Elonis v. United States, “said nothing about an intimidation requirement” that Collier previously relied upon, Sutton said.
“We cannot fault the district court for following one of our precedents,” Sutton concluded. “But in view of Elonis, we have no such obligation and now make clear that this aspect of Alkhabaz is no longer the law of the circuit.”
Contact staff writer Zack Peterson at zpeterson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6347. Follow him on Twitter @zackpeterson918.