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| Photo: NYDailynews.com |
(Telegraph) By Philip Sherwell - A disagreement among America's Amish that led to a series of forced beard cuttings has ended with 16 members of the sect in court, some facing long prison terms.
Sitting on the back of a horse-drawn hay-cart on his dairy farm in the rolling rural heartland of Amish country, Andy Hershberger gripped his foot-long beard as replayed the struggle with assailants wielding hair-clippers.
"They were holding me down and had already got a chunk of the hair from my head," he explained. "They had my beard in their hands like this and they were ready to shear it when the clippers broke."
For his 77-year-old father Raymond, a bishop in the fundamentalist Protestant sect, there was no such good fortune. The attackers cut off his long white beard and much of the hair from his head before they fled into the night.
In what prosecutors claim was a vindictive rampage of spiritual grudge-settling, the Hershbergers were two of nine Amish victims shorn in such attacks in central Ohio.
After a three-week trial in Cleveland, a jury is now deliberating whether this was indeed a religious hate crime or, as the defence contends, the equivalent of a family feud. Read full story
