Source: Associated Press
By JIM SUHR
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A St. Louis man ordered to spend more than a quarter century in prison on drug charges has failed to have his prosecution overturned, despite his argument that he has a religious duty to sell heroin.
In an appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, Timothy Anderson did not deny he was a heroin dealer. Instead, he cast himself as “a student of Esoteric and Mysticism studies,” saying he had created a religious nonprofit that aims to get the powerful narcotic to “the sick, lost, blind, lame, deaf and dead members of God’s Kingdom.”
Anderson insisted his prosecution on a 2013 indictment violated federal protections of religious rights because his heroin peddling was an exercise of his “sincerely held religious belief.”
The trial judge last year summarily rejected Anderson’s claims without holding a hearing and barred him from presenting his religious arguments to the jury that ultimately convicted him of conspiracy and of possessing heroin with intention to deal. On appeal, Anderson said U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel had erred.
Categories: America, Religion, The Muslim Times, USA