White supremacist fails literature test

After he was handed a suspended sentence last year for collecting anti-Semitic, white supremacist and extremist documents on hard drives, British man Ben John received an unusual order from a judge: read works of great literature by Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens instead.

‘‘He has by the skin of his teeth avoided imprisonment,’’ Judge Timothy Spencer told the Leicester Crown Court in August.

But this week the sentence was overturned by an appeals court, which imposed a new sentence of two years in prison.

The original sentencing of John, then 21, last year sparked debate and anger in the United Kingdom, with some critics suggesting that a non-White person would never receive the same punishment under Britain’s anti-terrorism laws.

In court, Judge Spencer called John a ‘‘lonely individual with few if any true friends’’, and said he was not convinced that harm was likely to be caused. Instead, he made John promise to stop reading extremist material and turn to something else instead.

During a court appearance this month, before his sentence was overturned, John brought copies of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with him. ‘‘I enjoyed Shakespeare more than I did Jane Austen, but I still enjoyed Jane Austen by a degree,’’ he told the court, as reported by the Leicester Mercury.