Mobile, Alabama -- A federal jury here took about an hour Tuesday to convict a Neo-Nazi murder suspect of a host of firearms charges and a drug offense.
Daniel Dwight Brown, a self-avowed member of the Aryan Brotherhood, faces at least 15 years in prison on the federal charges. He also has a pending murder charge in Mobile County.
His attorney, Bill Scully, said his client will fight the federal conviction.
“I’m disappointed in the verdict,” he said. “My client steadfastly maintains his innocence, and he will do whatever he can to appeal the verdict.”
Mobile police officers investigating a shooting death in on March 11 found a pair of 9mm pistols in a Dumpster outside a bar on Swedetown Road in Theodore. Authorities contended that those guns potentially were used in the shooting of James Huddleston III, whose body was found on Rabbit Creek Road just north of Hamilton Boulevard.
An acquaintance of the defendant, Gary Paul Schreiner, testified that he knew the guns belonged to Brown.
Investigators also got a search warrant for Brown’s home and found a pair of active methamphetamine labs, a .22-caliber pistol and ammunition on March 18, according to testimony.
Brown, 40, was convicted in 2006 of third-degree escape, making it illegal for him to have firearms.
During his testimony, Schreiner told jurors and he, Brown and their girlfriends did drugs together. Schreiner also testified that he joined a white pride group in prison called Southern Brotherhood and bristled at suggestions by Scully that it was akin to the Aryan Brotherhood.
“We’re not racist,” Schreiner said. “They’re racist.”
Schreiner testified that members of the Southern Brotherhood merely are proud of their race. In a recorded interview with Mobile police homicide detective Mac R. “Rusty” Hardeman, Schreiner called the Aryan Brotherhood “ugly, hateful a-- people.”
The jury found Brown guilty of 3 counts of possession of a firearm by a felon and one count of possession of ammunition by a felon. The panel also convicted him of possession with intent to distribute more than 500 grams of methamphetamine, which carries a 10-year mandatory-minimum prison sentence. The 6th charge he was convicted of, possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, carries a 5-year sentence that must be served consecutively.
Scully said he would try to persuade U.S. District Judge Kristi DuBose to run the prison time from the other gun charges simultaneous to the other charges.
“There’s going to be an issue, probably, if they’re going to be stacked,” he said.
