Defiant to the end, Washington County Ku Klux Klan leader David Wayne Hull shouted "That's a lie!" yesterday when a federal judge told him he didn't consider Hull's racist and anti-government views in sending him to prison for 12 years on weapons charges.

David Wayne Hull

U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster, who is black, ignored the outburst, but a second one a moment later brought U.S. marshals to their feet and a rare rebuke from the judge.

"I have the authority," Lancaster intoned, "to have you removed from the courtroom and continue the sentencing in your absence."

Hull shut up after that and returned in handcuffs to the marshals' holding pen for transfer to prison.

In May, a jury found Hull, 42, guilty of possession of pipe bombs and firearms following an undercover investigation and a Feb. 13, 2003, raid on his Amwell property by the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said the conviction was the first in the United States under a 2002 anti-terror statute that bans teaching others how to use bombs or other weapons to commit a crime of violence.

The self-proclaimed imperial wizard of the White Knights, a Klan splinter group, Hull had gone to trial on 10 counts related to providing a pipe bomb to an informant, possessing a silencer and instructing followers how to make bombs at a demonstration on his property on Nov. 19, 2002.

He was also charged with witness tampering in connection with an attempt to get a woman who helped publish his Knightwatch newsletter to lie that he never wrote under the pen name "Unknown Terrorist."

Federal prosecutors said he illegally possessed two pipe bombs and a silencer in July 2002, exploded a pipe bomb in October 2002 and gave pipe bomb components to an FBI informant in November 2002.

Hull also was charged with one count of manufacturing and one count of transferring bomb components on Nov. 19, 2002, in addition to possession of a weapon by a convicted felon.

The jury found him not guilty on two possession charges and another count of distributing bomb-making information, but guilty on all the rest.

In arguing for maximum prison time, prosecutors said Hull advocated terrorism in telling people how to kill with explosives.

"He told a great many people how to build a bomb and how to plant it to cause maximum damage," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Margaret Picking.

Although Hull accused public defender Penn Hackney of ignoring him, Hackney still argued for leniency, saying Hull never really intended any violence and was just baiting federal agents on government wiretaps.

In the end, Lancaster's sentence fell in the middle of the guideline range of 130 to 162 months. Although the federal guidelines are no longer mandatory in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision, the judge chose to use them anyway.

Lancaster said the sentence had nothing to do with Hull's political or social views, but rather his conduct in teaching others to build bombs. He said he believed Hull's actions were only "marginally" motivated by his politics but stemmed mostly from his "need to transform himself from an otherwise insignificant or obscure entity to an individual of artificially inflated stature."

Lancaster also pointed out that Hull's hatred of the U.S. government did not prevent him from taking advantage of government services, such as the Supplemental Security Income disability payments he receives.