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Attorney Dean Carro discusses the Amish hair-cutting trial
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: October 12, 2012
University of Akron professor and local attorney Dean Carro was one of 17 defense attorneys involved in the recent Amish hair- and beard-cutting trial that resulted in convictions on federal hate crimes for several members of a local Amish community.
The defendants are now awaiting sentencing.
The trial was, said Carro, “very unusual, for a number of reasons,” both legally and culturally.
To refresh, 15 members of a sect of Ohio Amish, headquartered in Bergholz, near Steubenville and under the direction of one Bishop Samuel Mullet Sr., invaded the homes of several Amish families in northeast Ohio and cut the facial hair of five Amish men.
The 16 men and women who had engaged in these home invasions were convicted of federal hate crimes in a trail held in the Cleveland courtroom of the Northern District of Ohio under federal court judge Dan Aaron Polster.
As of this writing, nine of the defendants, including Mullet, are in jail and seven are free on bond. Two defendants who had been let out on bond had their bonds revoked by the judge, including Carro’s client, Lester Miller.
Mullet’s community had split from another Amish settlement in Ohio nearly two decades ago following a dispute over religious differences. Although the sect is headquartered in southeast Ohio, some of Mullet’s followers live in the local Amish communities in Geauga and Holmes counties.
Carro’s client, Lester Miller, lives in Geauga County.
Carro said that that kind of split, in and of itself, may not be as uncommon as people may think. An Amish community, he said, is family-based. Once that family gets too large to fit into one home—perhaps growing to 25 or so, a new community is started.
Each one of those communities, although still members of the Amish clan and the local church, can have variances in many aspects of their daily lives, he said.
The Amish, recent studies have found, are one of the few religious groups that are actually growing in population in the last decades. One of the reasons that is so, said Carro, is linked to the fact that most Amish families have close to a dozen children, most of whom stay within the Amish life.
But that life has numerous clans, orders and various rule permutations at the same time. It is a natural part of the Amish landscape for the various orders to consider other orders apostate in some way, which can account for an attack like that of the Mullet order, Carro said.
The Geauga and Holmes Amish, “are two separate communities, which were founded by a number of different families. Within that, there are numerous orders, and the distinctions between them can be pretty significant,” Carro said.
The sequence of events that led to the beard cutting began six years ago, when about 300 Amish bishops had gathered in Pennsylvania to discuss Sam Mullet Sr., who had ordered the shunning of families that left his settlement in southeast Ohio.
Shunning is an extremely serious punishment in the Amish community, forcing a person who has likely spent his or her entire life in the Amish tradition to suddenly be cut off from everyone and everything familiar and holy.
It is a punishment reserved only for the most severe violations of Amish rules, say experts.
The bishops at that gathering vetoed Mullet's shunning of the others, which prosecutors contended had infuriating Mullet to the point that he sought revenge in the hair- and beard-cutting attacks.
Fifteen people broke into those homes and cut the hair of the men who had offended Mullet.
Federal prosecutors brought hate crimes charges against the 15 and Mullet. For his part, Mullet said that he had not ordered the hair cutting, and that he had the right, at any rate, to punish those whom he believed had violated church laws.
The number of defendants, and, therefore, the number of lawyers involved, was only one of the many unusual facets of this trial, said Carro.
“There were a total of 21 lawyers involved,” said Carro, which made for quite the crowded defense bar table. That total included private attorneys, two local federal prosecutors, one prosecutor who was assigned in by the Department of Justice and two public defenders, one of whom represented Mullet Sr.
“There were a lot of Akron lawyers and a lot of Cleveland lawyers,” said Carro.
There were also, he said, 17 opening and 17 closing arguments, and a 75- page set of jury instructions. Prosecutors took an hour for opening statements and 90 minutes for closing arguments, while the defense, with all of their attorneys, spent four-and-a-half hours talking to the jury to both close and open the case.
Other Akron- and Youngstown-area attorneys who were on the defense team, besides Carro included George Pappas, Rhonda L. Kotnick, Brian Pierce, Robert Duffrin, Nathan Ray and David Jack.
The facts, though “largely undisputed, were very complex,” said Carro.
The attitude of the defendants took aback most of the defense lawyers and likely the prosecutors, Carro said.
In the Amish way, everyone told the truth. “That is not the attitude of most criminal defendants,” he said.
“They all told the authorities exactly what happened,” said Carro. “There was no real fight about the facts.”
Another unique facet of the case was the government’s charge of the crime itself, making cutting beards a federal hate crime.
“It was really a case of first impression,” said Carro. “It was the first hate crime trial based on religion in the Northern District, and the first or second one in the country. There were not many guiding legal principles, and many of the legal issues that came up had to be newly addressed. That made the trial even more complex.”
The trial itself, beyond the preparation, took a month of the attorneys’ time.
“The trial took 10 days of in-court time, spread over three weeks,” said Carro. Then the jury was out four-and-a-half days before coming in with a guilty verdict on all counts against all of the defendants.
“It was potentially a litigation minefield that was navigated well by our judge,” said Carro. “He was also dealing with 21 lawyers, which could have been a nightmare in and of itself. We were also confronted with an enormous amount of material.”
Instead of a nightmare, though, Carro said that every attorney was completely above-board and totally professional and he had particular praise for the government attorneys.
It was during the trial preparation that Carro was tasked with figuring out how to defend Lester Miller. He also had to read 2,500 pages of resource material and go over a 50-person witness list.
During that time, he said, he had the opportunity to become familiar with Amish life—something that very few people outside of that tight-knit community can ever experience.
“This case was different because all of the lawyers had to understand this culture to be effective as defense counsel,” said Carro.
He visited the Miller home three times while preparing for the trial, he said, in order to be better able to communicate with the jurors about the views of the defendants. He also talked with his client once at a neutral site. His total time with Miller was about eight hours before the trial got underway.
Each time that he visited the Miller home, Carro said that, “they could not have been nicer to me.”
There were both positives and negatives involved in Carro’s getting to know his client, he said. The positives included getting that rare glimpse into the lives of the Amish. The negative, he said, included, “becoming involved in their lives. The verdict had a personal effect on me.”
The Amish that he got to know, said Carro, “are a very disciplined people. They are able to live a life according to 17th century principles in the 21st century. They have no electricity, no phones in their homes, no cars, no power equipment, kerosene lamps. The Millers have 11 kids, and they were in the room next to where he and I were talking. I couldn’t hear a one of them.”
The Millers, Carro found, “are people who truly believe in their principles and espouse them and try to live every day and every hour by them.”
In the end, getting to know the Amish on their own terms was, said Carro, “a life-changing experience. Their honesty, their devotion to their principles—the Amish are amazing.”
Recent press reports say that the defense is planning to appeal the convictions.