AP News, August 18th, 2007
Two members of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang will get life in prison for plotting the murders of two black inmates after a jury deadlocked on whether to recommend the death penalty.
A federal jury deliberated about 4 1/2 days before announcing a deadlock Thursday. Jurors voted 9-3 in favor of the death penalty for Wayne Bridgewater and 11-1 against the death penalty for Henry Michael Houston, authorities said.
The men will be formally sentenced to life without chance of parole on Oct. 16, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office.
The case was part of a larger indictment that federal prosecutors hope will eventually dismantle the Aryan Brotherhood, a violent white supremacist organization accused of running gambling and drug operations from inside some of the nation's most dangerous prisons.
At least a half-dozen other trials are pending in Southern California, where federal prosecutors are handling Aryan Brotherhood cases from around the country, Assistant U.S. Attorney Terri Flynn said Friday.
Bridgewater, 55, of Washington state, and Houston, 45, of California, were convicted May 31 of murder, racketeering, conspiracy to murder and other charges in the August 1997 slayings of black inmates at a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa.
Prosecutors said the inmates were killed after Aryan gang members got an invisible-ink message that said "War with D.C. Blacks." Defense attorney Steven White said prosecutors misinterpreted that message, which was a warning about a gang war brewing elsewhere and not an order to kill.
Bridgewater was serving time in the Lewisburg prison for bank robbery and for injuring an inmate at another federal prison, Flynn said. Houston was convicted of marijuana trafficking in a California prison and sent to Lewisburg, he said.
Four other Brotherhood leaders were sentenced to life in prison in without parole last year for their role in the murders. Two other men were convicted in January of plotting at least six murders from behind bars and will be sentenced in May.
