Dr. Kent Hovind in Jail: Charges, Appeal, and Life After Prison

Kent Hovind went to jail after a federal jury in Pensacola convicted him in November 2006 on 58 counts of tax fraud, illegal structuring of cash transactions, and obstructing the Internal Revenue Service. In January 2007, Judge Casey Rodgers sentenced the young-earth creationist evangelist known as “Dr. Dino” to ten years in federal prison. He served roughly nine of those years and was released in July 2015.¹²

What He Was Convicted Of

Hovind ran Creation Science Evangelism Enterprises and the original Dinosaur Adventure Land theme park out of Pensacola, Florida. Instead of withholding federal income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes for his workers, he called them “missionaries” and treated his ministry as a church that owed the government nothing. Federal prosecutors did not agree.

The 58-count indictment returned in July 2006 broke down into three groups of charges:³

Twelve counts of willfully failing to collect and pay federal employment taxes for Creation Science Evangelism workers between 2001 and 2004, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.⁴
Forty-five counts of structuring bank withdrawals. Between July 2001 and August 2002, Hovind and his wife Jo pulled cash out in amounts of $9,500 or $9,600 to stay under the $10,000 threshold that forces banks to report the transaction to the federal government.
One count of corruptly obstructing the IRS by paying employees in cash, filing a false bankruptcy petition, filing frivolous lawsuits against IRS agents, destroying records, and threatening investigators.

Jo Hovind was charged alongside him. Trial evidence showed she had personally cashed roughly 200 checks in amounts under $10,000, totaling about $1.5 million over four years, sometimes cashing two checks in a single day on either side of the bank’s daily cutoff.¹

The Trial and Ten-Year Sentence

Trial opened on October 18, 2006, and lasted two weeks. A former employee testified that Hovind knew about the $10,000 reporting requirement and had complained about it, which cut against any argument that the withdrawal pattern was accidental.⁵ On November 3, 2006, after about two and a half hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Hovind on all 58 counts. Jo Hovind was convicted on 44 structuring counts.⁶

At sentencing on January 19, 2007, Judge Rodgers imposed 120 months in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release. Hovind was ordered to pay $604,874.87 in restitution to the IRS plus $7,078 in court costs, and the jury returned a special forfeiture verdict for $430,400, the total tied to the structured withdrawals.⁴⁷ Jo Hovind received a sentence of one year and one day.⁸

The Appeal and Hovind’s Legal Arguments

Hovind’s defense drew heavily from tax-protester and sovereign-citizen theories. He argued his ministry was exempt under the separation of church and state, demanded the IRS point to a specific Title 26 provision requiring him to withhold, insisted structuring laws applied only to transactions at or above $10,000, and claimed his lawsuits against IRS agents could not be “corrupt” because filing lawsuits is itself lawful.

The Eleventh Circuit rejected all of it on December 30, 2008, and affirmed both convictions and sentences. Willfulness, the panel held, requires awareness of a legal duty, not knowledge of a particular statute. The structuring statute plainly prohibits keeping transactions under $10,000 to evade reporting. And otherwise legal acts become corrupt when their purpose is to thwart government officers doing their jobs.⁴

Forfeiture of the Pensacola Property

The $430,400 in structured cash was long gone, so the government went after substitute property. In 2009, Judge Rodgers ordered forfeiture of nine parcels around the 5800 block of North Palafox Street — the original Dinosaur Adventure Land site — plus two bank accounts.⁹ Hovind’s son Eric was allowed to keep one home on Cummings Road that was found to be legally his; other third-party ownership claims were rejected. The government was directed to sell only enough property to reach $430,400, with any surplus returned.¹

In 2012, a federal injunction barred Hovind and his associates from filing further documents to cloud title to the forfeited parcels. He ignored it.

A Second Case While He Was Still in Prison

In 2014, still serving his original sentence, Hovind was indicted a second time along with Paul John Hansen, a Nebraska man who had acted as a trustee for Hovind’s property interests. The six-count indictment charged mail fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and criminal contempt, based on fraudulent liens and lis pendens filings against the forfeited properties.¹

At the March 2015 trial, the jury convicted both men of one count of criminal contempt and hung on the mail fraud and conspiracy counts. In May 2015, Judge Rodgers granted Hovind’s motion for judgment of acquittal on the contempt count, finding that the 2007 forfeiture order lacked specific language directing or prohibiting his conduct.¹⁰ The government then moved to dismiss the remaining charges without prejudice, effectively ending the case against him.¹¹

Release in 2015

Hovind was released in July 2015 after serving roughly nine years at federal facilities including the Edgefield Federal Correctional Institution in South Carolina and FCI Berlin in New Hampshire. He returned to Pensacola and spent about a month on home confinement as a condition of supervised release.²

Life After Prison

A New Dinosaur Adventure Land in Alabama

In 2018, Hovind reopened Dinosaur Adventure Land on a 140-acre former gravel mine in Lenox, in Conecuh County, Alabama. The property is owned by Creation Science Evangelism Ministries Inc., which holds 501(c)(3) status and later obtained church recognition from the IRS, exempting it from Form 990 filing.¹²¹³

Divorce, Remarriages, and a Domestic Violence Conviction

Hovind and Jo divorced shortly after his release. He married Mary Tocco in September 2016; she left him after about nine months, later telling a reporter, “I decided I don’t want to play a lead role in the next debacle.” He married Cindi Lincoln in July 2018 in a ceremony conducted without a state license.¹⁴¹⁵

On July 30, 2021, Hovind was arrested in Alabama on a charge of third-degree domestic violence after an arrest warrant alleged he had thrown Lincoln to the ground, causing bodily harm.¹⁶ On September 21, 2021, Judge Clinton Hyde of the Conecuh County District Court found him guilty and sentenced him to one year in jail with thirty days to be served. His defense moved for a new trial and sought a jury trial.¹⁷ Lincoln later filed a civil suit in Conecuh County alleging Hovind owed her $1,300 a month for twenty years in exchange for roughly $130,000 she had invested in his ministry. Hovind reportedly married Sandra Princess Sawyer in September 2021.¹⁵

The Half-Billion-Dollar Lawsuit

In 2020, Hovind and Hansen sued the United States, Judge Rodgers, several federal prosecutors and agents, and Hovind’s former attorney for $536,041,100. The complaint alleged multiple constitutional violations and relied on a sovereign-citizen “enclave” theory that the federal government lacked jurisdiction over the land where he was prosecuted.¹⁸ The Eleventh Circuit dismissed the appeal in September 2021 after Hovind and Hansen missed a deadline to file a corrected brief.¹⁷

Outstanding Tax Liability

Separate from the criminal restitution, a May 2013 U.S. Tax Court order found Hovind owed more than $3.3 million in total taxes and penalties.¹⁹ He has continued to seek a presidential pardon for his original federal convictions.¹²

1
Pensacola News Journal. Evolution of Dr. Dino
2
Pensacola News Journal. Hovind Free From Jail, Back in Pensacola
3
National Center for Science Education. Kent Hovind Arrested on Federal Charges
4
Justia. USA v. Kent E. Hovind
5
Forbes. Was Kent Hovind’s Structuring Indictment Flawed
6
Orlando Sentinel. Evangelist Guilty in Tax Case
7
National Center for Science Education. Kent Hovind Sentenced to Ten Years
8
Wikisource. United States v. Hovind, Opinion of the Court
9
GovInfo. United States v. Hovind, Forfeiture Order
10
Forbes. Free Kent Hovind Movement Has Big Win
11
Pensacola News Journal. Hovind’s Unresolved Charges Dropped
12
AL.com. Alabama’s Dinosaur Adventure Land
13
Forbes. Collection Suit Against Glen Stoll
14
Forbes. How Tax Resistance Can Hurt Your Marriages
15
Forbes. Kent Hovind’s Third Wife Sues Over Financial Commitments
16
AL.com. Alabama Evangelist Kent Hovind Arrested on Domestic Violence Charge
17
Forbes. Kent Hovind Half Billion Lawsuit Ends as He Faces Domestic Assault Charge
18
Forbes. Kent Hovind Sues US Government for Over Half a Billion Dollars
19
Forbes. Kent Hovind’s Battle With the IRS in Retrospect