(JTA) — The Missouri white supremacist charged with murdering three people at two Jewish sites in suburban Kansas City last year told a court that the killings were necessary and his “right.”
Frazier Glenn Miller, 74, who is representing himself, appeared in U.S. District Court in Johnson County, Kansas, on Friday.
Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan said Miller could not use the “compelling necessity” defense following an hourlong speech by the defendant about Caitlyn Jenner, AIDS, Israel, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, British wartime leader Winston Churchill, the Rev. Billy Graham and a Jewish conspiracy he alleged was behind the sitcom “All in the Family,” according to The Associated Press. Miller said he would use the defense to argue that he committed the attacks in order to stop “the Jewish genocide of the white race.”
Miller, a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon who also goes by Frazier Glenn Cross, is charged with capital murder in the April 13, 2014, shootings. He allegedly killed two people at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park, Kansas, and one person outside Village Shalom, a Jewish assisted-living facility a few blocks away. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the case.
Miller,, told the Kansas City Star that he began planning the attacks when he became so sick with emphysema that he thought he would die soon and that he conducted reconnaissance missions of the JCC and Village Shalom in the days before the shootings.
“I wanted to make damned sure I killed some Jews or attacked the Jews before I died,” he told the newspaper. None of the victims were Jewish.
The trial is scheduled to begin with jury selection on Aug. 17.
