OKLAHOMA CITY—A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the conviction and sentencing of a prisoner convicted of trying to copyright his name and blackmail prison officials in El Reno.
A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled against the appeal made by 57-year-old Russell Dean Landers.
Landers was one of three prisoners convicted in the scheme. In April 2008, U.S. District Judge Timothy DeGiusti sentenced Landers to an additional 15 years in prison, while Clayton Heath Albers and Barry Dean Bischof each received an additional 14 years in prison.
DeGiusti ordered that the sentences be consecutive to the federal sentences now being served by the three inmates. Landers is serving a sentence related to his participation in an armed standoff with FBI agents at the Montana Freemen ranch in 1996.
Landers appealed, saying DeGiusti erred in not allowing a proceeding to determine Landers’ competency, not allowing him to employ an expert witness for purposes of a psychological evaluation and in imposing a sentence that went a year beyond the federal guideline range.
“A reasonable judge in this situation would not have doubted Landers’s capacity to understand the proceedings, consult with counsel, or assist in preparing his defense,” Circuit Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich wrote in his opinion.
Tymkovich called “unpersuasive” Landers’ argument that Landers had also wanted to assert a possible insanity defense in the case.
Tymkovich also said the sentence was reasonable, as DiGuisti “concluded that Landers’s offenses ‘strike at the heart of the criminal justice system’ and that his conduct ‘reflects an utter disdain for the law and criminal justice system.'”
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons Web site, Landers now is being held at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., with a release date of August 2040. The 62-year-old Alberts is in prison in Pollock, La., with a release date in March 2033, while the 61-year-old Bischof is being held in a Victorville, Calif., prison, with a release date of April 2027.
In November 2007, a jury found the three men guilty of conspiracy and mailing threatening communications with the intent to extort.
Court documents indicated the men, who U.S. Attorney John Richter said were inmates at the El Reno federal prison in late 2003 and early 2004, tried to bill prison officials millions of dollars for using their names without permission and recruited a person with experience repossessing property to help them.
That person was an undercover FBI agent, who told the inmates he had changed the locks on the prison warden’s home, seized his car and frozen his bank accounts.
The inmates then offered to return the warden’s property if they were set free.
