An Army helicopter pilot who federal prosecutors say shipped nearly 1,800 orders of LSD to buyers on the “dark web’’ argued in court Wednesday that he has a religious right to sell the drug, deploying an unconventional legal strategy in an attempt to stave off his indictment.
Kyle Norton Riester, a first lieutenant on active duty with the 12th Aviation Battalion at Fort Belvoir, Va., argued in legal papers this month that “the Divine guidance and instruction he had received while communing with LSD’’ drove him to sell the hallucinogenic drug on dark-web marketplaces during the coronavirus pandemic.
“He felt compelled to dispense to co-religionists,’’ an attorney for Riester, George G. Lake, argued at a hearing in US District Court in Alexandria. “His religion still compels him,’’ Lake said Wednesday as Riester nodded along.
Federal prosecutors allege that the Black Hawk pilot, who has a security clearance, collected nearly $122,000 in LSD proceeds over an 11-month period. He shipped at least 1,797 orders from 2022 to 2024, they said, to buyers including a 15-year-old and an undercover law enforcement officer.
Washington Post
