When Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle stepped off a plane at LAX in July 2008 -- a couple of jet-lagged Brits on the lam from the United Kingdom -- they looked for the first uniformed U.S. official they could find. Unfortunately for them, they found one.
They thought they had found safe harbor from the English court that three days earlier had convicted them of hate-related writings originating on their website. Rather than wait for sentencing -- expected to range from a year or two for Whittle to perhaps five years or more for Sheppard -- the men skipped bail and hopped a plane in Dublin, believing that U.S. free-speech traditions and the visa waivers they secured at an Irish airport would shield them.
Sheppard says he approached a U.S. official in Los Angeles, showed him the visa waiver and said in effect, "I'm sorry to be a nuisance, but we want to claim political asylum in the United States."
Eleven months later, Sheppard, 52, and Whittle, 42, remain in U.S. custody, spending their days in orange jumpsuits in the Santa Ana City Jail and awaiting a return to England and likely jail sentences. Since arriving in America, they haven't spent a single day as free men.
"We thought they'd hold us for a day or so," Sheppard said through a Plexiglas window in a jail interview. "We couldn't see how they wouldn't grant us asylum. The things we supposedly had done in Britain aren't illegal in America."
As it turned out, that was beside the point.
The men, known as the "heretical two" to supporters, aren't in U.S. custody because of their world views. Nor have they committed any crime in America. Their lengthy detention is largely the product of the asylum-seeking process that Sheppard and Whittle brought on themselves when they entered the country. They and their original attorney acknowledge that motions they filed helped prolong the case.
That concession, however, is somewhat lost on the men, convinced that their ongoing incarceration has as much to do with threats to the 1st Amendment as to the laborious nature of the asylum process.
"We came to the beacon of free speech in the Western world," Sheppard said, "which turned out to be a complete fantasy."
U.S. officials won't discuss the men's case, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice in Orange County said their visa waivers became invalid once they indicated to officers at LAX that they intended to try to stay in the United States. She said that U.S. authorities learned early on about the men's legal situation in Britain and that it was a factor in their lengthy detention.
