FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal of a former Fairbanks militia leader convicted of conspiring to kill federal officials.
Schaeffer Cox’s appeal was among the more than 150 petitions to the court rejected without explanation Monday, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported .
Cox, an advocate for gun rights and the anti-government sovereign citizen ideology, was convicted of nine felonies by an Anchorage jury in 2012.
The charges included conspiracy to murder federal officials, solicitation to murder federal officials and charges of owning and conspiring to own illegal weapons.
A federal appeals court overturned the murder solicitation conviction but upheld his other convictions last year.
Cox is serving a 26-year prison term but is scheduled to be resentenced based on the federal appeals court ruling.
His sentence for the murder solicitation was to run concurrently, so a new sentence may not alter his prison time, authorities said.
Cox was arrested in 2011 with a group of his supporters on charges that they had planned to kill federal employees, including employees of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration.
In his appeal, Cox argued that discussions of killing federal officials should not be considered a criminal act.
He claimed the conversations recorded by two FBI informants were theoretical discussions on contingency plans for unlikely events, such as the collapse of the federal government.
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Information from: Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner, http://www.newsminer.com
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