Florida man gets 14 months for racist cross burning

MIAMI, Feb 2 (Reuters) A Florida man has been sentenced to 14 months in prison for burning a cross in his front yard to intimidate a black family as they considered buying a nearby house, the US Justice Department said.

Neal Chapman Coombs, 50, of Hastings, Florida, was sentenced on Wednesday after pleading guilty in August to a racially motivated civil rights charge of willfully intimidating the family by threat of force and use of fire.

Cross burning in the United States is widely associated with the Ku Klux Klan and was used by the white supremacist group to intimidate black Americans.

In 2003, the US Supreme Court upheld a 50-year-old Virginia law that banned cross burnings carried out to intimidate. The Court noted that cross burning in the United States was a particularly powerful symbol intertwined with the history of the Klan and racial intimidation in the South.

''Cross burning remains a vicious symbol of hatred and intolerance,'' said Wan Kim, an assistant attorney general, in a written statement on the Coombs case, yesterday.

Prosecutors said the family was visiting their prospective new home on January 15, 2006. The parents were inside with a real estate agent negotiating the sale and their 15-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter were outside.

Coombs set fire to a six-foot (1.8-metre) wooden cross in his front yard, looked at the teenager and said ''I don't want to see you around here again, boy,'' prosecutors said.

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