Brits are no strangers to irony, and Sheppard and Whittle are well aware of its presence in their situation. "All they had to do," says attorney Bruce Leichty, who represented them early in the case, "was get off the plane in LAX and walk off into the free world."
Leichty, who no longer represents the men, said that U.S. officials should have told them to find an asylum attorney and that the visa waivers granted at a U.S. Port of Entry in Dublin should have protected them from incarceration.
A federal immigration judge in Los Angeles disagreed. In October, Judge Rose Peters sided with a government attorney who argued that officials acted properly in detaining the men for further questioning after they sought asylum.
Sheppard and Whittle were convicted in England for a string of essays and other published material on Sheppard's heretical.com website, which uses a server based in Torrance. Sheppard was convicted on 11 counts, Whittle on five. In January, Sheppard was retried in absentia and convicted on five more charges.
Their online entries follow the well-traveled path of other nationalist polemicists, with particular emphasis on decrying the influence and power of Jews in the world.
"People are entitled to hold racist and extreme opinions which others may find unpleasant and obnoxious," Mari Reid, a lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service's Counter Terrorism Division in England said in a prepared statement earlier this year about the case.
"What they are not allowed to do is to publish or distribute those opinions to the public in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner either intending to stir up racial hatred or in circumstances where it is likely racial hatred will be stirred up."
The vast majority of the material in this case concerned Jewish people, Reid said, "but there was also material relating to black, Asian and non-white people generally, all described in derogatory terms using offensive language."
Because of the right-wing nature of much of their material, Sheppard and Whittle believe Britain's Labor government has targeted them for prosecution. That belief formed part of the basis for their asylum request.
Sheppard, who sold computer equipment before he bolted to America, said he considers himself more of a scientist interested in human behavior. Whittle, a freelance writer, describes himself as an "anti-Marxist" satirist who doesn't subscribe to all of the traditional extreme right-wing positions, such as enmity toward gays or working women.
