Accused Klan Boss Found Incompetent

Charles Barefoot, the leader of a North Carolina Klan group that plotted to blow up the local sheriff’s office in 2001, has been found mentally incompetent to stand trial for orchestrating the murder of a fellow Klansman. After reviewing a psychologist’s evaluation, a Sampson County Superior Court judge ruled that Barefoot, 45, was “not competent to stand trial because he currently does not possess a rational understanding of the proceedings against him.”

The judge ordered that Barefoot be committed indefinitely at Dorothea Dix Hospital in order “to determine whether there is a substantial probability that his competency will be restored in the foreseeable future.”

Barefoot and his KKK splinter faction were examined in last summer’s edition of the Intelligence Report, which detailed how the criminal investigation of Barefoot “opened a rare window into the inner workings of the modern-day Klan in the South, a secret and sordid culture of violence, racism and paranoia, where coon dogs are traded for liquid dynamite, crosses are burned next to the local Waffle House, and a Klan grand dragon presides over meetings in a ramshackle clubhouse on the edge of a swamp.”

Since 2003, Barefoot has faced two trials, one state trial on murder charges and one federal trial for alleged gunrunning. Barefoot has done his part to gum up the wheels of justice by filing more than 100 bizarre motions from prison, all of them based upon “redemption” theory, a financial conspiracy theory popular with right-wing extremists. Redemptionists hold that every U.S. citizen has a “straw man,” or secret, legal twin, created by the government to capture the economic value of citizens who, or so the doctrine goes, have unknowingly been sold into slavery to a Jewish-run international banking cabal.

At Barefoot’s most recent pre-trial hearing in February, a federal judge cut him off as soon as he started spewing redemptionist jargon. “That's all gibberish and that doesn’t make any sense,” said U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle. “That kooky stuff you’re doing right now is almost proof positive you are not competent.”