Cross-Burning KKK ‘Cyclops’ Convicted of Sexual Assault on Medicated Woman
The former Alabama leader of the International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, whose record includes a hate crime and firearms violations, now has been convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to additional prison time.
Steven Joshua Dinkle, scheduled for release from federal prison in Louisiana in August after serving 15 months for being a felon in possession of a firearm, now will serve 10 more years in a state prison.
The 31-year-old former Klansman was sentenced last week in state court in Ozark, Alabama, after being convicted of sexually assaulting a medicated woman and videotaping the crime.
Dinkle did not take the stand in his own defense in the trial, but has maintained his innocence and plans to appeal his latest conviction, his attorney told media outlets.
“The state is very thankful that the judge saw fit to give him [the maximum] 10 years and make it consecutive [to his current] federal sentence,” Dale County District Attorney Kirke Adams told an Alabama television station.
While serving as the “exalted cyclops” of the Ozark chapter of the International Keystone Knights, Dinkle was arrested by the FBI in November 2013 in Mississippi on federal hate crime charges stemming from a 2009 cross burning in a predominantly black neighborhood in Ozark.
He pleaded guilty to those charges in February 2014, confessing that he “burned the cross because of the victims’ race and color and because they were occupying homes” in an Ozark neighborhood.
His mother, Pamela Morris, also a Klan member, was arrested in 2013 on charges of lying to a grand jury about her son’s involvement in the cross-burning.
She was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but was released after serving only about a year, federal records indicate.
Dinkle was released from prison in 2015 for the cross-burning conviction, only to be arrested again for being a felon in possession of a .32 caliber pistol.
He pled guilty to that federal firearms charge last year and was sentenced on June 30, 2016, to 15 months in prison.
