CLEVELAND — Samuel Mullet Sr., the domineering leader of a renegade Amish sect, and 15 followers were convicted of federal conspiracy and hate crimes Thursday for orchestrating a series of bizarre beard- and hair-cutting attacks last fall that spread fear through the Amish of eastern Ohio.
The verdict vindicated federal prosecutors, who made a risky decision to apply a 2009 federal hate-crimes law to the sect’s violent efforts to humiliate Amish rivals.
Mullet, 66, founder of a community near Bergholz, Ohio, and 15 followers, including six women, were tried for their roles in five assaults on people Mullet had described as enemies. The jury heard three weeks of testimony and deliberated more than four days before reaching a verdict.
Although Mullet did not directly participate in the attacks, prosecutors labeled him the mastermind of the assaults, in which groups of his followers held down victims and sheared their beards and hair. Among the traditional Amish, men’s long beards and women’s uncut hair are central to religious identity.
