Angry at 10-year prison term, offender tries to arrange to kill judge and gets another 80 years
Angry at being sentenced to a 10-year prison term in 2013 for failing to register as a sex offender, William Ray Phillips tried to arrange to assassinate the Texas judge who put him behind bars, a state-court jury found Wednesday after less than two hours of deliberation.
That solicitation of capital murder conviction resulted in another 80-year prison term for Phillips, 64, when he was sentenced Thursday in the Waco case, according to the Associated Press and the Waco Tribune. Phillips turned down a pretrial plea deal that would have called for a 30-year prison term.
Phillips, who plans to appeal his conviction, would have been eligible for parole after 15 years under the plea deal. Now he will be eligible for parole only after serving 30 years, another Waco Tribune article reports. The prosecution had sought a life prison term, supported by testimony from Phillips’ 36-year-old daughter, Shaylin Jordan, who said her “biological father” had sexually abused her when she was a young child. Jordan OK’d the use of her name by the newspaper, which ordinarily does not identify claimed victims of sexual attacks.
Key evidence in his trial included a Feb. 2014 video of a prison meeting between Phillips and an undercover Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent posing as a hit man. The unidentified agent testified that Phillips offered to pay him $30,000 to kill 54th State District Judge Matt Johnson. Phillips said he expected to get the money from a wrongful prosecution lawsuit against McLennan County.
The agent also got Phillips to sign a contract on legal paper that outlined the terms of the assassination agreement, the Tribune reports. Before exiting the meeting, the agent urged Phillips to keep the plan secret and told him not to try to hire anyone else to kill the judge, who was not injured. Authorities set up the sting after another inmate brought Phillips’ desire to kill the judge to their attention.
Phillips had contended that he wasn’t required to register as a sex offender because his state-court conviction was reversed. An appeals court ruled in 2011 that he should not have been prosecuted after the statute of limitations expired, as an earlier ABAJournal.com post details.
However, the sex-offender registration requirement still applied to Phillips due to a 2002 federal child-pornography conviction.
