Right Wing Terrorism Watch: Shooter of UU Church pleads guilty, gets life

[ck4829]

An out-of-work truck driver smiled Monday as he pleaded guilty to killing two people and wounding six others at a Tennessee church last summer because he considered the liberal church "a den of un-American vipers."

"Yes, ma'am, I am guilty as charged," Jim D. Adkisson, 58, told Criminal Court Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz before she sentenced him to life in prison without parole on two counts of first-degree murder and six of attempted murder.

Adkisson was scheduled to stand trial next month in the July 2008 rampage at the Tennessee Valley United Unitarian Church in Knoxville, but decided to enter a plea deal that virtually guarantees he will never leave prison alive.

Public defender Mark Stephens said a mental health expert determined Adkisson was competent to make the plea, though Stephens was prepared to argue at trial that his client was insane at the time of the crime. Adkisson believed entering the plea was "the honorable thing to do," Stephens said.

...

John Bohstedt, one of the church members who tackled Adkisson, said he didn't believe Adkisson was insane, but was manipulated by rhetoric aimed at liberals.

"Unbalanced, yes. Bitter, yes. Evil, yes. Insane, not in our ordinary use of the word," Bohstedt said.

"There are a lot of people who hate liberals, and if we stir that around in the pot and on the airwaves, eventually there will be people (like Adkisson) ... who get infected by the violent rhetoric and put it into violent action," he said.

Bohstedt said he was worried about future violence: "Do you think there are other Jim Adkissons out there listening to hate speech? I do."

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