Minnesota Militia Member Sentenced on Firearms Charges
A man arrested a year ago in what the FBI described as a plot to bomb the Montevideo, Minn., police department has been sentenced to 40 months in prison by a federal judge who said she was convinced there was no such conspiracy.
“I don’t think you are a terrorist or part of a conspiracy,” U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery told Buford “Bucky” Rogers before sentencing him on two federal firearms charges, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.
Rogers, a member of a small antigovernment group called the Black Snake Militia, was arrested May 3, 2013, about two weeks after a deadly terrorist bombing at the Boston Marathon. Rogers had come under investigation in October 2012 for possible suspected ties to antigovernment, militia and white supremacist organizations.
The judge said Rogers’ arrest “became a national news story that drew an inordinate amount of pretrial publicity” for what eventually became an ordinary crime of illegal possession of two explosive devices and a firearm,” the Minneapolis newspaper reported.
Rogers, 25, pleaded guilty in January to being a felon in possession of a firearm and illegally possessing homemade bombs.
Federal prosecutors asked the court to sentence Rogers to 63 months in prison – within the suggested federal sentencing guideline range of 57 to 71 months, given his criminal record. His first brush with the law came in 2005 when he brought a pellet gun and shotgun shells to school. He later was convicted of burglary.
Rogers’ attorney, federal defender Andrew H. Mohring, asked the court to sentence Rogers to 24 months of less in prison.
In court filings, Mohring said the federal investigation “failed to substantiate the extensive claims” initially made by law enforcement, including “casting Mr. Rogers as a domestic terrorist” who planned to blow up his hometown police department.
“That Mr. Rogers was the target of an investigation is unremarkable,” Mohring said. “However, the publicity that surrounded the investigation addressed an obvious political agenda.”
The defense attorney told the court that “a veritable armada” of 50 law enforcement personnel, with two armored personnel vehicles, from four federal and state agencies “descended on Montevideo” to arrest Rogers.
Federal prosecutors said the response was appropriate, given the circumstances known at the time by the FBI.
“Today, separated by nearly a year from the bombings in Boston, he [Rogers] chooses to view these events in hindsight and wag an accusing finger at the FBI’s response last May in Montevideo,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Winter told the court. “However, this is both naïve, self-serving, and dangerous.”
“At the time the FBI ‘descended’ on Montevideo, the FBI had been informed that the defendant was part of a group cheering the Boston bombing, possessed explosive devices, and planned to conduct violent acts imminently,” Winter told the court. The FBI also had been told that Rogers’ father allegedly had fired through his front door on a previous occasion when he believed law enforcement officials were on his doorstep.
“The fact that a broader plot was not discovered is not exculpatory,” Winter said, adding that Rogers and his attorney lack the expertise to tell the FBI how to conduct investigations and make arrests.
“It is unlikely that [Rogers] has the training and experience to determine precisely how many personnel are needed to cordon off a residential neighborhood to protect the citizenry from the shrapnel-laced bombs he constructed,” Winter said. “The government and the public should, and will, continue to defer to the FBI’s professional experience on such matters.”
