ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Friday, January 24, 1997               TAG: 9701240062
SECTION: VIRGINIA                 PAGE: A-1  EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER

STUMP'S TERM SAID TOO SHORT MILITIA MAN'S SENTENCE DOESN'T MEET GUIDELINES

Chief U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser gave militia member Bill Stump a big break in his sentence last year - a break an appellate court has told Kiser to take back.

Kiser sentenced Stump last March to two months in prison and two months under house arrest on charges relating to illegal silencers. Now he must be resentenced, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week.

The court ruled that Kiser erred in giving Stump less time than the 27 to 33 months required by federal sentencing guidelines.

Stump was a member of a defunct Pulaski County citizens' militia known as the Blue Ridge Hunt Club and is a self-styled "constitutionalist" who refused to recognize the authority of Kiser's court. He enlivened his trial last year with his unorthodox style of representing himself and by repeatedly serving the judge and prosecution with lawsuits.

The Pulaski machinist was convicted in 1995 for his activities at the hunt club's second meeting in May 1994. At the meeting, he handled two rifles equipped with homemade silencers fashioned out of galvanized pipe. Stump said he fired at least one of them - at the urging of a government informant - during target practice in the woods.

Any attachment to a gun that reduces its sound is considered a silencer and is illegal unless registered with the federal government.

The three-judge appellate panel in Richmond disagreed with Kiser's reasoning that Stump only briefly possessed the silencer for the "benign" purpose of target practice and that sentencing guidelines didn't take that into account.

"We believe that Congress intended to prohibit the possession of illegal firearms (including silencers) without regard to the amount of time they were in the defendant's possession," the appellate court ruled.

A Supreme Court decision in last year's Rodney King beating case imposed a narrow standard for appellate courts to review the decisions of sentencing judges who deviate from the guidelines. The high court said appellate courts may review such decisions only for "abuse of discretion."

In Stump's case, the appellate court found that Kiser had abused his discretion by considering a factor not allowed by the guidelines. Judges are allowed to depart from the guidelines only in "atypical" cases not adequately addressed in the guidelines.

Kiser called Stump's use of the silencer "bare-bones possession" and said there was no evidence that Stump planned to use the silencer to commit other crimes, as the guidelines presume.

While the government appealed Stump's reduced sentence, Stump appealed his conviction. The appellate court said his argument that the conviction was unconstitutional because federal courts are illegal was "without merit."

Stump has argued in court that he shouldn't be found guilty because he wasn't the owner of the silencer and that nobody was harmed by his crime. The government shouldn't be allowed to send him to prison, or what he called "Congress' sodomy camps," he said.

Kiser now will have to schedule another sentencing hearing for Stump.

LENGTH: Medium:   61 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  (headshot) Stump. color.