http://crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/conspiracy.php
Looking back over the past decade, it appears that North American law
enforcement agencies are increasingly utilizing conspiracy charges to target
anarchists and others involved in radical communities. We’ve composed a review of recent conspiracy cases in hopes of analyzing
this.
If conspiracy charges are becoming central to the state's strategy against anarchists,
it is imperative that we develop a strategy of our own to respond to this and
seize the initiative rather than simply reacting over and over to individual
cases. This text is a humble effort in that direction, in hopes of inspiring
more thoughtful reflections from our comrades.
Conspiracy charges are convenient for police and federal agents in that they do
not require authorities to prove that any actual illegal activity took place,
only shared intent. In that regard, they are an ideal weapon to wield against
ideologically-based communities; they also lend themselves to government agents’ efforts to entrap naïve activists.
There are also signs that the authorities may be attempting
to fabricate evidence for larger conspiracy cases on a national scale. It’s
impossible to know whether these will ever pan out, but it’s certainly better
to be prepared.
What can we do to respond to this strategy of repression? Here are some basic
starting places:
The state targets public
organizers like the SHAC 7 or
the RNC 8 because they are effective. Public organizing groups
have been essential in creating the necessary conditions for anarchists to
determine the character of recent mobilizations such as those against the 2008
Republican National Convention and the G20 summits of 2009
and 2010. The same goes for local and ongoing campaigns.
Even when it is framed as a strategic choice, retreating from public organizing
can only play into the hands of the authorities. Repression is intended to
cause militants to back away from engaging with the public, losing connection
with a broader social base and deepening the false dichotomy between passive
“community organizing” and clandestine direct action. This is not to say
everyone must organize publiclyon the contrary, one function of public
organizing is to prepare a favorable ground for more generalized and anonymous
actionsbut that it is a necessary aspect of anarchist struggle.
There are many ways we can do
this. Perhaps the most obvious is to practice
appropriate security culture, sharing sensitive information on a
need-to-know basis and doing our best to keep informants out of our circles.
Security culture is not only for those who may be party to illegal activity; it
is important for everyone connected to networks that the state is interested in
mapping or disrupting. Some hypothesize that one of the reasons the authorities
didn’t bring conspiracy charges against organizers of the Pittsburgh
G20 protests was that, in contrast to the RNC Welcoming Committee,
individuals suspected of being police agents were not permitted into the
coordinating group. The closer informants are to us, the easier it is for them
to prepare cases of some kind, however fabricated.
Likewise, it’s important to keep an eye out for federal bounty hunters preying on naïve young activists.
Often they prefer to target the least experienced or connected individuals in a
social milieu instead of tangling with longtime militants. We can also
inoculate ourselves against disruption by sorting out internal conflicts before
they offer infiltrators or prosecutors opportunities to divide us against each
other.
After so many conspiracy cases have been brought against anarchists, we should
no longer be surprised by new ones. We need to be thinking in advance about how
to respond to them; that means preparing legal support structures and bail
funds even when we don’t have reason to believe we’re about to be targeted. It
also means being intentional about how we conduct ourselves so we don’t make it
easier for prosecutors to demonize us. In the words of grand jury resister Carrie Feldman,
Whenever someone is targeted
with a politically motivated conspiracy case, it’s important that we mobilize
the very best legal defense we can. This means hiring good lawyers, not just
accepting lazy and often outright backstabbing court-appointed defenders. Every
conspiracy case against radicals sets a precedent for more of the same;
defending one of us is literally defending all of us. Good lawyers serve two
functions. First, they intimidate the state, which will be more likely to
bargain or drop charges if it knows pressing them will be expensive and risky. Second,
they can win cases or get them thrown out, as recently occurred in the case of
the AETA 4. Raising the money to defend one person effectively
can save a lot more money and heartache in the long run.
Public support campaigns are equally important. On one side, this means going
public when you are targeted--both so you can receive support and so that
repression will be brought into the spotlight. On the other, it means
organizing long-term support for defendants, so they will feel invested in
answering to the community and so the authorities will have to factor in public
relations challenges when they consider whether to target us. Support campaigns
can target the most vulnerable individuals in the power structure; the
supporters of the RNC 8 did this by concentrating on county attorney Susan
Gaertner, who was eventually forced to drop the terrorism charges against the defendants.
Finally, though this should go without saying, we can protect ourselves from
conspiracy charges simply by not cooperating with the authorities. Of the cases
detailed below, many of them would never have gotten off the ground if people
had not been intimidated into making statements against their former comrades.
Nobody talks, everybody walks--that goes for our whole community as well as
specific groups of defendants.
Defendants who cooperate with the government never come out ahead. As detailed
below and elsewhere, not only do they lose friends and community support, they
rarely get significantly shorter sentences--and doing prison time is much
harder as an informant.
If the authorities come to rely
on pressing conspiracy charges against anarchists as a central strategy of
repression, we must take advantage of the ways this makes them vulnerable. Many
in our society, and not just radicals, are uncomfortable with the idea of
people being persecuted for thought crime. We need to find ways to address
people outside our social and political circles about the prevalence of
conspiracy charges, so as to utilize this opportunity to discredit the state
and delegitimize conspiracy-based cases. The broader the range of people who
disapprove of this tactic, the more the hands of the authorities will be tied.
Most of this work has yet to be done. If you are concerned about government
repression, consider the ways you can approach others outside radical
communities about this issue.
When we talk about conspiracy charges and witch hunts, it’s important to
emphasize that we’re talking about the state, which exists to carry out
violent repression. As long as there are inequalities and injustices, there will
be resistance, and those in power will attempt to repress it. If we take
ourselves seriously as a revolutionary movement, we need to see ourselves in
the larger context and histories of resistance movements and the repression
they have faced; we would do well to learn both from the successes and the
failures of the past. It’s also important to remember that repression is a
daily fact of life for countless people in communities on the wrong end of
power and privilege; anarchists are far from exceptional in this regard.
This is hardly a comprehensive
survey of conspiracy charges pressed against anarchists and other radicals in
recent history. However, it does cover some of the landmark cases that created
the current context, as well as ongoing cases that will set important
precedents.
Altogether, this review encompasses charges pressed against nearly a hundred
individuals. The cases themselves vary from fairly conventional uses of
conspiracy charges to outright entrapment and examples that stretch the legal
definition of conspiracy even by prosecutors’ standards.
In the early days of the 21st
century, although several hearings before Congress had brought governmental
pressure to bear against the animal liberation movement, efforts to quash
direct action organizing by capturing and prosecuting participants proved
fruitless. Finally, a New Jersey federal grand jury indicted seven individuals
and the organization Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty USA on charges of animal
enterprise terrorism under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act on May 26, 2004. Charges
of interstate stalking and conspiracy to use a telecommunications device to
harass others were also included in the indictment. It has been said that the
defendants were essentially targeted for running a website advocating direct
action.
The SHAC 7 were convicted on March 2, 2006 under the AETA. Their conviction
probably emboldened law enforcement agencies to utilize conspiracy charges to
target radicals nationwide, especially in cases in which simple criminal
charges could not be pressed convincingly or did not appear to offer enough of
a deterrent.
On December 2, 2004, federal
prosecutors indicted Rod Coronado on conspiracy charges related to a local
environmental group interfering with mountain lion hunting in Sabino Canyon in
March 2003. The indictment came just seven days before Coronado was to stand
trial for three lesser misdemeanor charges filed after his arrest in Sabino
Canyon on March 26. The new charge carried a maximum penalty of six years in
prison.
Coronado faced this among many other charges in a concerted campaign of
harassment across several years. On December 13, 2005, he and codefendant
Matthew Crozier were found guilty of felony conspiracy to interfere with or
injure a government official, misdemeanor interference with or injury to a
forest officer, and misdemeanor depredation of government property. Coronado
was sentenced on August 6, 2006 to eight months in prison, three years
supervised probation, and fined $100. Crozier was sentenced to 100 hours
community service, three years probation, and a $1000 fine.
In December 2005 and January
2006, with assistance from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and
Explosives (ATF), the FBI indicted six women and seven men on a total of 65
charges, including arson, conspiracy, use of destructive devices, and
destruction of an energy facility. The defendants were named as Joseph Dibee
(still at large), Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, Sarah Kendall Harvey (née Kendall
Tankersley), Daniel
McGowan, Stanislas Meyerhoff, Josephine Overaker (still at large), Jonathan Paul,
Rebecca Rubin (still at large), Suzanne Savoie, Justin Solondz (currently in custody in China), Darren Thurston, Kevin Tubbs, and Briana Waters (not
charged with conspiracy). A number of other unindicted co-conspirators were
also named, including Jacob Ferguson, Jen Kolar, and Lacey Philabaum, all of
whom joined Meyerhoff, Gerlach, Harvey, Savoie, Tubbs, and Thurston in
accepting plea deals in return for informing to the government. Another alleged
co-conspirator, William Rodgers, committed suicide while in police custody.
Nathan Block and Joyanna Zacher were added in a superseding indictment in June
2006.
In January 2006, as a result of
a separate investigation but widely reported as an extension of Operation
Backfire, three more individuals: Eric McDavid, Zachary Jenson, and Lauren Weiner
were arrested in Auburn, California for conspiring to damage facilities “by
explosive or fire.” Jenson and Weiner took cooperating plea bargains, selling
out McDavid, who was convicted on all counts September 27, 2007 and was
sentenced in May 2008 to nearly 20 years in prison.
The McDavid case is notable because of the role of a paid informant, “Anna,”
who essentially entrapped the defendants by utilizing money and flirtation to
lure them into discussions about illegal activity. It subsequently received coverage in Elle magazine among other venues.
Nathan Fraser Block, aka
“Exile,” and Joyanna Lynn Zacher, aka “Sadie,” were arrested in February 2006
in Olympia, Washington in connection to the Jefferson Poplar Farm fire which
occurred in 2001 in Clatskanie, Oregon.
In November 2006, Joyanna Zacher and Nathan Block each pled to one count of
conspiracy, attempted arson, plus multiple arson charges from actions at the
Joe Romania Chevrolet car dealership in Eugene and the Jefferson Poplar tree
farm, as part of a global resolution agreement with prosecutors in the
Operation Backfire case. Daniel McGowan and Jonathan Paul entered plea deals in
the same hearing, resolving all the outstanding Operation Backfire cases. All
four defendants refused to assist in government investigations of other
activists. It is worth noting that, compared to the cooperating defendants in
the Backfire case (see chart, as a GIF
or PDF ), the non-cooperating defendants received
proportionately shorter sentences.
Eight Black community
activists, including former Black Panthers, were arrested January 23, 2007 on
charges related to the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. Similar
charges were thrown out after it was revealed that police had used torture to
extract confessions when some of the same men were arrested in New Orleans in
1973.
Richard Brown, Richard O'Neal, Ray Boudreaux, and Hank Jones were arrested in
California. Francisco Torres was arrested in Queens, New York. Harold Taylor
was arrested in Florida. Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim had already been held
as political prisoners for over 30 years in New York State prisons. The men
were charged with the murder of Sgt. John Young and conspiracy encompassing
numerous acts between 1968 and 1973. Bail amounts were originally set between
three and five million dollars each.
Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim were sentenced to probation and time served,
after Bell agreed to plead to voluntary manslaughter and Muntaqim agreed to
plead nolo to conspiracy to voluntary manslaughter. All charges were then
dropped against Brown, Jones, Taylor, and Boudreaux, with the prosecution
admitting it had “insufficient evidence” against them. Charges had already been
dropped against O'Neal in 2008.
Francisco Torres is the last one still facing charges; he maintains his
innocence and will appear in court on September 17.
In March 2008, Marie Mason,
Frank Ambrose, Aren Burthwick, and Stephanie Lynne Fultz were arrested
and charged with conspiracy to commit arson; Mason and Ambrose faced
additional charges related to acts of property destruction that occurred in
1999 and 2000. It came out that Ambrose, Mason’s ex-husband, had been assisting
the FBI extensively in investigating environmental organizing since 2007;
despite this, his plea bargain resulted in a nine year sentence, two years more than the prosecutor had
requested. Burthwick and Fultz also negotiated cooperating deals with the
Justice Department, agreeing to help in the investigation of Mason. Mason was
threatened with a life sentence before accepting a plea bargain in September 2008, in which she
also admitted involvement in 12 other acts totaling more than $2.5 million of
property damage.
Mason was sentenced on February 5, 2009 in federal court in Lansing,
Michigan. She received almost 22 years, the longest sentence of any Green
Scare prisoner. The sentence is currently being appealed.
Bryan Rivera, aka Bryan Lefey,
was arrested July 2008 on charges relating to a July 2000 Earth Liberation
Front action at the U.S. Forest Service Facility in Rhinelander, WI, where
genetic research was being conducted on trees.
Katherine Christianson was originally named as a co-conspirator. Government
informant Ian Wallace, who was cooperating in investigations into
other ELF actions, got involved and named Aaron Ellringer and Daniel McGowan as
additional co-conspirators. Christianson and Ellringer eventually became
government informants. All were convicted; Ellringer received four days,
Christianson 2 years, Lefey 3 years, Wallace 3 years for this and related
actions.
Green Scare prisoner Daniel
McGowan, already serving a 7 year sentence, had also been involved in the
Rhinelander action, but was not prosecuted federally for it as stipulated in
his 2006 non-cooperating plea agreement. McGowan steadfastly refused to
cooperate in the Rhinelander investigation, and in summer 2008 his federal
sentence was suspended for a brief time while he was held in civil contempt for
refusing to testify before a grand jury about the action.
In what was the first use of
criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot Act,
Ramsey County prosecutors charged eight alleged organizers of protests against
the 2008
Republican National Convention with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of
Terrorism. The 8 faced up to seven and a half years in prison under the
terrorism enhancement associated with the charge, which allows for a 50%
increase in the maximum penalty. They later received more charges: conspiracy
to commit property damage, conspiracy to commit property damage in furtherance
of terrorism, conspiracy to riot, and the original charge.
In early April 2009, county attorney Susan Gaertner dropped the charges of
Conspiracy to Commit Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism and Conspiracy to Commit
Criminal Damage to Property in Furtherance of Terrorism. This occurred shortly
after one of the defendants appeared on MSNBC and petitions to drop all the
charges were delivered to Gaertner’s office, including a resolution from the
17,000-member Duluth Central Labor Body in support of the RNC 8.
The terrorism charges were dropped as a direct result of a political pressure
campaign against Gaertner, who had pressed the charges and was running for
governor at the time. After protests at all of her campaign events and various
other disruptions, Gaertner’s name became synonymous with the RNC 8 to such an
extent that eventually she had to adopt “The courage to do the right thing
even when it is politically unpopular” as a campaign slogan. When Gaertner
dropped the terrorism charges, she explained to a local paper that the
terrorism charges would be “distracting” and “a disaster at trial.” This was
not enough to save her campaign; she later dropped out of the governor’s race
entirely.
Significantly, no conspiracy charges were filed against organizers of protests
against the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This seems to
indicate that the support campaign for the RNC 8 was successful enough to
discourage the state from attempting the same strategy, although it was surely
caused by factors in Pittsburgh as well. The latter may include the willingness
of the organizing group to exclude suspicious individuals and hesitance on the
part of local officials to go after well-connected activists.
The other two conspiracy charges remain pending against the RNC 8. The trial
will begin on October 25, 2010.
On February 19 and 20, 2009,
the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI arrested Joseph Buddenberg, Maryam Khajavi, Nathan Pope, and Adriana
Stump; they were charged with conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise
Terrorism Act for protest activity relating to home demonstrations in which
they wrote on a sidewalk with chalk, among other things.
A judge dismissed the case “without prejudice” in July 2010 on the grounds that
the government didn’t give enough specifics on the alleged criminal activity:
Because the case was dismissed
without prejudice, the government can re-indict the defendants; it is unclear
whether this will occur.
Gina “Tiga” Wertz and Hugh
Farrell were arrested on April 24, 2009 by Indiana state authorities and
charged with multiple counts of intimidation, conversion, and corrupt business
influence, a felony racketeering charge, for their involvement in protests
against I-69. The felony racketeering charge was later dismissed. Both pled
July 2010 to misdemeanor charges and received 15 months probation.
Kevin Olliff was arrested in
April 2009 on state charges for protest-related activity against UCLA
vivisectors three years earlier; he faced 10 felony charges including multiple
counts of stalking, conspiracy, conspiracy to stalk, and threatening of a
public servant. Olliff did not make bail and stayed in jail for almost a year
before he pled to six of the ten felony counts against him in March 2010 in a
non-cooperating plea agreement.
Carrie Feldman was subpoenaed
to a federal grand jury in Davenport, Iowa in October 2009. She read a
statement of non-cooperation and pled the 5th Amendment, and was re-subpoenaed
for November. Scott DeMuth was subpoenaed to appear with her, and the two were
both jailed for civil contempt on account of refusing to answer questions.
Scott DeMuth was indicted for conspiracy to violate the AETA days later, and
was released pending trial; Feldman was jailed for four months, during which
time her case received public attention. She was eventually released because
“her testimony is no longer needed.” DeMuth’s trial is scheduled to begin
September 13, 2010.
Eleven people were arrested on
May 1, 2010 in Asheville, NC, accused of doing $20,000 worth of damage to
downtown businesses. Each was charged with 3 felonies (felony riot, felony
conspiracy to riot, felony damage to property) and 10 misdemeanors (one was charged
with 11). Initially set at $10,000, bail was ratcheted up to $65,000 apiece as
the authorities implemented anti-anarchist scare tactics in the media and court
system. Their trial dates have yet to be set.
Sixteen people were arrested
and charged with conspiracy on account of the protests against the G20 summit in Toronto, Canada. Although this is occurring
in Canada, the Canadian government is clearly hoping to utilize the conspiracy
model pioneered in the SHAC 7 and RNC 8 cases to terrorize dissidents involved
in laying the framework for the most intense protests Ontario has seen thus far
this century. As of now, little information is available about the Toronto G20
charges; the government is not releasing any information, and lawyers appear to
be advising the defendants to proceed extremely carefully.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
--
A revolution now cannot be confined to the place or people where it may
commence, but flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart, from land to
land, til it has traversed the globe ...
--Frederick Douglass
Free All Political Prisoners!
nycjericho@gmail.com
• www.jerichony.org