Thursday, May 27, 2010
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
YOUNGSTOWN
A federal prisoner who threatened to kill President Barack Obama and others while an inmate at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center has been sentenced to six years and five months in prison.
The term will be served consecutively to the three years he already had been serving for failure to register as a sex offender.
Phillip C. Clayton, 35, who made vivid threats as to how his intended victims would die, drew the sentence Wednesday from U.S. District Judge David S. Cercone in Pittsburgh.
Clayton pleaded guilty last month to mailing threatening letters Jan. 14 and 19 from NOCC on Hubbard Road to the federal court clerk in Youngstown.
The letters contained death threats against the president, the court clerk, a federal judge, the warden and corrections officers at NOCC, the Allegheny County jail warden in Pittsburgh and a Cambria County, Pa., common pleas judge. The threat against Obama was in the Jan. 14 letter.
In addition to those two counts, Clayton earlier had pleaded guilty to three counts of mailing threatening communications to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania on July 1 and Nov. 30, 2009, and to the Cambria County Common Pleas Court on Nov. 30, 2009.
When he wrote the letters from NOCC, Clayton was in federal custody after having been sentenced to three years in prison for failing to register as a sex offender as required late in 2007, when he moved from California to Meyersdale, Pa.
The U.S. Marshals Service and Secret Service investigated the threatening-letter case, which was prosecuted by John J. Valkovci Jr., an assistant U.S. attorney based in Johnstown, Pa.
The Jan. 14 letter from NOCC threatened that a victim “will die with fish hooks in your eyes” and “with a machete in your skull in a small pond with piranhas eating your body.” That letter referred to a victim having “swastikas painted in pig’s blood on his forehead and all around his body.”
The last threatening letter, mailed from NOCC on Jan. 19, said a victim would “suffer extreme torture, things unspeakable” and that his wife would be raped.