Mostly, they came at night. Two or three people would hold down the victims, who were often elderly, while another person used battery-powered clippers or scissors to shear the victims' beards or hair. When they were done, they would take pictures.
The 16 Bergholz barbers, as they have come to be known, carried out five attacks on Amish men and women in Ohio over the course of three months in 2011. Often, they were the sons or daughters or in-laws of the victims. All of them were part of another putatively Amish community of roughly one hundred people who lived together in the Yellow Creek Valley in central Ohio, a few miles east of the town of Bergholz. In February of 2013, they were sentenced to prison terms ranging in length from one to 15 years, becoming the first-ever Americans to be convicted of hate crimes under a federal statute. On Wednesday, this conviction was overturned by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals; two judges on a three-judge panel upheld counts of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and lying to the FBI, but said the attacks didn't meet the standard of a hate crime.
As judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote in the majority decision, there is nothing typical about the Bergholz case, from its setting among the normally peaceful Amish communities to the nature of attack—shaving people's hair and beards. In the initial trial, after five days of deliberation, the jury concluded that these were religiously motivated attacks. But in their decision to overturn this conviction, the Sixth-Circuit judges held that it's not fair to say that faith "permeates the motives for the assaults in this case, no matter how mundane the personal, power, or getting-one’s-way disputes that formed the backdrop to these assaults. Even people of the most theocratic faith may do things—including committing crimes—for non-faith-based reasons." It’s a fascinating question: For people like the Amish, whose lives are almost completely defined by religious devotion, is it possible to extricate faith from anything they do?
In this case, untangling an answer involves a lot of other questions. To start: Were the Bergholz barbers actually Amish? That's what they called themselves, but they didn't attend church, conduct daily prayers, or identify with Christianity. Adult women were allowed to live in the home of the community's leader, Sam Mullet, and members were encouraged to use paddles to strike one another in moments of disagreement. When they first settled in the Yellow Valley in 1995, Mullet's wife, Martha, explained in a letter to an Amish leader that they "wanted to step back in time a little and live more like our grandparents, because the drift in the Amish church is so plain to see ... So we stepped back in times, no bathrooms, no pressure water, no modern or power tools for carpentry work, only allowing dark-colored dresses, etc."
Especially after the attacks, members of the press and other Amish communities frequently called the Bergholz community a cult. Donald Kraybill, a sociologist at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who consulted for the prosecutors in the case and recently published a book on the trial, says the group isn't exactly Amish, but they're not a cult, either—they're more like a clan.
"They weren’t out recruiting other people to join, they didn’t have people coming from various backgrounds. They’re all members of the same family," he said. "At one point, there were families there in the community who were not part of the Mullet family—but they all got excommunicated because they raised questions about Sam [Mullet], the bishop’s, autocratic excommunications.”
These excommunications played a role in who later became victims of the beard-cutting attacks. One middle-aged couple, the Millers, had followed their six children to the Bergholz community in 2007 but left almost immediately out of religious objections. Another man was part of a committee of Amish bishops that met in Ulysses, Pennsylvania, in 2006 to decide what to do about the excommunications Mullet had issued; ultimately, the committee decided not to honor them, even though excommunications in one Amish community are typically recognized by all other Amish communities across the country.
In his book, Kraybill described the mindset that led to the attacks, which evolved over time: "Like a prophet of old, Sam voiced a lonely, solitary plea in the wilderness against God's rebellious people ... [He] is called to preach against the swelling tide of disobedience in the larger Amish world."
Throughout the legal proceedings, it became clear that Mullet had an extremely strong influence on the Bergholz community and acted as the mastermind behind the attacks. He directed his co-conspirators to attack the victims' hair, reasoning that "it’s a religious degrading to cut the hair and the beard." This was painfully true; after he was attacked, 76-year-old Raymond Hershberger told police that "I'd rather have them beat me black and blue than take my hair."
In October 2011, Mullet told a local Ohio television station that "it’s all religion, that’s why we can’t figure out why the sheriff has his nose in it—it started with us excommunicating members that weren’t listening and obeying our laws." Even though Mullet himself was not involved in any of the attacks, during his sentencing in 2013, the judge told him that he "[deserved] the harshest, the longest sentence. I'm convinced ... that these attacks would not have occurred but for you."
The judges on the Sixth Circuit Court saw Mullet's role within the Bergholz community a little differently. "Even ostensible faith leaders, whether Samuel Mullet or Henry VIII, may do things, including committing crimes or even creating a new religion, for irreligious reasons," they wrote. They pointed to family strain and old feuds as motivations for the attacks.
The legal reasoning in the Circuit Court's decision was pretty technical, but this explanation shows that even the most technical arguments are premised on fundamental views about human nature. Despite the evidence that the Bergholz barbers chose their victims because they were "Amish hypocrites" and attacked with the specific intention of creating religious shame, the judges saw Mullet's charismatic, corrupting influence as separate from his religious beliefs. He was first a man, and only second a man who called himself Amish.
The specific reason they didn't see the attacks as hate crimes turned on a linguistic distinction made by the Supreme Court this year in Burrage v. United States, which clarified the legal meaning of the word "because." According to the statute used in the case, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, a hate crime happens when someone "causes bodily injury to a person ... because of [that person’s] actual or perceived ... religion." "The Dictionary definitions of the phrase reflect this common-sense understanding: 'Because of' means 'by reason of' or 'on account of' the explanation that follows," the judges wrote. But in this case, "because of" has to meet the Supreme Court's "but-for" standard: But for eligion, the Bergholz attacks would not have happened. Since the original jury was instructed to evaluate whether religion was a "significant motivating factor," and because the Supreme Court ruling hadn't happened yet, the "but-for" standard wasn't considered. Ultimately, the Sixth Circuit judges didn't think the attacks met the clarified "but for" standard, since there were non-religious motivations for the crime, they said.
The dissenting judge, Edmund Sargus Jr., disagreed with this reasoning. "Overwhelming and uncontested evidence adduced at trial demonstrates
that “but for” the victims’ Amish religion, their beards and hair would not have been cut," he wrote. There wasn't much evidence that non-religious motivations were involved, he argued, but even if they were, it wouldn't matter: Religion was part of the motivation for and nature of the attacks. Or, in mild legalese, "the majority construes the 'because of' provision to require the victim’s protected class to be the but-for cause rather than a but-for cause. This runs afoul of Burrage."
What's most striking is not that religion was involved in the motivation for the attacks—it's that this religion was involved. Everything about this case troubles the stereotype of what it means to be Amish: The violence, the desire for revenge, the attackers' willingness to speak openly to the press about their community. For outsiders, the Amish are always a bit of a curiosity—a foreign community in our midst, seemingly from another time. When they're being accused of committing hate crimes with horse shears by night, they're a spectacle.
"In the American imagination, people have this love-hate relationship with the Amish," Kraybill said. "On the one hand, we esteem them: They have this rural, almost idyllic way of life with a strong sense of family and a strong sense of identity. They’re devout religious people, they work hard—they articulate what we think were the values of early Americana."
"On the other hand, I think we get annoyed about them," he continued. "They’re driving horse-and-buggy on the highways ... They’re self-righteous, perhaps, and they’re not adapting to modern life. They object to high school ... They won’t let women be leaders in the congregation, and on and on."
For outsiders, the whole case is baffling: How could the peaceful, pacifist Amish have done this? Kraybill said. "But on the other hand, perhaps there's some glee. They’re just like us. They’ve got some problems, too. They’re not goody-goody saints like they’d like us to think they are—they can become angry and violent, as well."
Just like us: human, and, as some would say, fallen. Whether the hate-crime conviction will eventually stand is still yet to be determined; the U.S. district attorney's office is reportedly "reviewing the opinion and considering our options." Kraybill said the prosecutors will either ask for a review by the full Sixth Circuit, take the case to the Supreme Court, initiate a new trial, work with Ohio prosecutors to charge them with a hate crime under state law, or just drop it. But the less technical and perhaps more compelling question is not whether these were hate crimes, but crimes of hate. The Bergholz attackers acted out of a sense of moral obligation, yet they ended up causing so much pain—to their parents, to the broader Amish community. The six women who were convicted had 42 children among them; many of their husbands were also given jail time.
At the sentencing, one of the victims' sons, Lester Miller, apologized to his parents. "I didn't want to hurt you. I just wanted to help you. I hope someday you can forgive me."