Lock Them Up? 1/6 Insurrectionists Need Sentences Similar to Eco-terrorists

Susan Burgess — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 19:42:12 +0000

The first trial from the 1/6 attacks is scheduled this week and it is likely to set the stage for additional trials to follow. Also this week, the United Nations has released a report finding that climate change is profoundly altering the world more quickly than had been thought earlier, making over half the world’s population “highly vulnerable” to significant negative impacts.

Over 770 rioters have been charged with crimes associated with the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, including Nicholas Languerand, who recently received a three year and eight month prison sentence for assaulting police officers. The judge said that the police officers at the Capitol that day deserve to be called patriots, not the rioters.

So far one-tenth of the total rioters charged have received sentences ranging from prison time, home confinement, or probation. The longest of these is 63 months for using a fire extinguisher against Capitol police. The median sentence is 45 days.

Justin McAuliffe, who recently plead guilty to the misdemeanor of parading, picketing, or demonstrating inside the Capitol, requested a lighter sentence than the maximum six months imprisonment, arguing that as an accountant he had lost clients as well as his TSA pre-check privileges, and has been banned from driving for Lyft and using Airbnb.

Will the involved self-proclaimed right-wing insurrectionists be charged and punished under the same strict guidelines as those labelled left-wing “eco-terrorists” have in the past?

So far, the answer seems to be no.

In Canada, some have argued that a recent attack on a gas pipeline is the real terrorist threat, rather than the truckers obstructing traffic in its capitol city of Ottawa. Here in the U.S. Republicans Sen. John Borrasso of Wyoming argued that President Biden’s selection to lead the Bureau of Land Management, Tracy Stone-Manning, should be automatically disqualified due to an earlier association with Earth First, which he called an eco-terrorist organization.

Environmental and animal rights activists in the U.S. have employed various tactics since the 1970s, including protests, lobbying, documentation of animal mistreatment, and the “liberation” of captive animals from fur farms and research labs.

Some have used their bodies to block the passage of heavy equipment or otherwise sought to physically disrupt logging, whaling, and construction projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, between 1995 and 2010, activists belonging to one or both of two related groups, the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, were responsible for 239 arson attacks and bombings in the United States to curtail exploitation of animals, raise public awareness, and decrease the profitability of targeted industries, causing more than $110 million in property damage.

For example, in 1998, ELF and ALF activists firebombed a Vail ski resort due to despair and anger about the state of the environment. The attack caused $12 million in damage. In 2001, ELF activists protesting gene modification research set fire to the office of a University of Washington professor in 2001, accidentally destroying several other faculty offices and 20 percent of an adjacent library’s book collection.

In response, these radical environmental and animal rights activists were labeled as eco-terrorists and singled out by high-ranking FBI officials as America’s “number one domestic terrorism threat.” This set in motion a period of heightened surveillance, legislation, prosecution, and incarceration.

Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) in 2006, designating it a felony act of terror to intentionally interfere with the profits of farms, processing plants, circuses, zoos, research facilities and other “animal-related enterprises” as well as providing harsher penalties for harassment and intimidation resulting in a “reasonable fear of death or bodily injury.”

An informant led to the identification of 11people who were arrested and tried for 17 ELF and ALF actions in Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Colorado, and California. Some were charged with arson, while others were charged with lesser crimes.

Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General in George W. Bush’s administration, said these arrests proved the United States “will not tolerate any group that terrorizes the American people, no matter its intentions or objectives.”

Even after pleading guilty, many of these activists were sentenced to serve six to 10 years, and some received a “terrorism enhancement” penalty which mandated their time be served in a maximum-security facility with strict limitations on visitation and other forms of outside contact.

In 2009, Marie Mason was sentenced to nearly 22 years after pleading guilty to 13 counts of ELF-related arson, including setting fire to the office of a faculty member doing research on genetically modified crops. Her attorney said the sentence was like “using a cannon to shoot a mouse.” The average federal sentence for arson is about seven years, less than three years for physical assault, and for embezzlement, 11 months.

Following Congressional hearings in 2002 which were entitled “The Threat of Eco-Terrorism,” environmental and animal rights activists began to refer to these heightened penalties as part of a “Green Scare,” likening it to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s post-World War II Red Scare persecution of leftists who were alleged to belong to the Communist Party.

The Green Scare seems to have contributed to a decline in this movement over the last decade. Several ELF activists who served time have since disavowed arson and other forms of property destruction.

At her sentencing in 2007 nine years in prison for five arson attacks, Chelsea Dawn Gerlach said that she realized that the fire bombings had done more harm than good for the environmental cause. At his 2007 sentencing of 13 years in prison for setting fire to SUVs at an auto dealership, Stanislas Meyerhoff said his actions were misguided and cowardly, adding that he regretted negatively impacting the public’s understanding of the environmental movement.

The official ELF website harshly criticizes those who continue to advocate the use of illegal tactics for risking injury to others, alienating the general public, and condemning activists to years in jail. In 2015, their official website posted, “Regardless of the frustration we all feel about the enormous perils facing our Mother Earth, engaging the perceived wrong-doers with threats, intimidation, and destructive tactics will always fail.” ELF has not made the news in connection with a major incident of arson for several years.

To be sure, ELF and ALF activists have criminally destroyed private property through arson and other criminal tactics and set back ongoing research projects and business development. However, no one has been seriously injured during an ELF action.

The same cannot be said of the 1/6 insurrection, which resulted in at least nine deaths including five police officers and four protesters. Another 150 officers were injured. Hundreds of people working at the Capitol that day were traumatized.

The median prison sentence is 45 days for those being incarnated at all. Fewer than half have received any prison time. The longest sentence for any of the 1/6 Capitol rioters so far has been 5 years and 3 months.

In March 2021, Director of the FBI Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee calling the 1/6 riot at the U.S. Capitol “domestic terrorism,” and warning of growing violent homegrown extremism, especially in white supremacist groups.

Congress should pass a bill specifically criminalizing domestic terrorism. But in this time of intense political polarization, a lopsided administration of justice seems more likely.

In March of last year Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) re-introduced the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021 saying, “We need to be abundantly clear that white supremacists and other far-right extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States today. This threat must be confronted with the full force of the federal government.”

This Act was overwhelmingly passed the House but was blocked in the Senate by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). Durbin has been trying to get this bill passed since 2017. Political polarization has made it unlikely to pass anytime soon.

Whether the bill passes or not, existing sentencing enhancements should apply evenly across the political spectrum, including 1/6 insurrectionists on the political right. Perhaps it made sense to apply those enhancements to environmental activists who were deemed the number one domestic threat in their time. Now that the FBI Director and other government officials have said that the Capitol insurrection and related white supremacist activities the new leading domestic terrorist threat, isn’t it time that these enhancements are applied to them as well?

U.S. SCOTUS: Own Up To The Stench Of Politics as Usual And Historical

Susan Burgess — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 17:28:37 +0000

The U.S. Supreme Court is political.

That became abundantly clear for those who listened to the recent oral arguments in the abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and noted the decision to uphold the ban in Texas on abortions after six weeks.

So why do the SCOTUS Justices continue to insist that they don’t have political skin in the game?

The answer is that the more that Justices are political, the more they have to insist that they’re not. This is how ideology works.

I heard someone mention recently that the reason why a dog food can has a label that says “pleasant aroma,” is because everyone knows that dog food has an unpleasant stench. The fact that the can is labeled pleasant is a sign that it smells.

Similarly, the more people know that the Supreme Court is political, the more the Justices have to explain that they’re not.

At least six of the sitting nine justices have publicly despaired being seen as political. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently gave a talk at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville aimed at convincing the audience that the Court is “not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

Justice Samuel Alito said at the University of Notre Dame that the Court is not “a dangerous cabal.” He noted that he was going to follow Justice Stephen Breyer’s advice to “just do the job.”

Breyer’s recently published book denies that the Court contributes to “the peril of politics.”

Perhaps the Justices protesteth too much. Much of the American public agrees. According to a recent Gallup Poll, the Supreme Court’s approval rating has sunk to an historic low of 40%. Its very legitimacy is at stake.

This isn’t the first time that the Court has insisted that it isn’t political. It happened in 1857 when the Supreme Court denied an enslaved man’s plea for freedom in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case. That case led to the Civil War.

It happened again in 1905 when the Court refused to recognize workers’ rights in Lochner v. New York. Those Justices didn’t let up until President Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened to pack the Court during the New Deal Era.

And it’s about to happen yet again in the current abortion case in Dobbs. History suggests trouble is ahead.

To be sure, the way that the Supreme Court is political is not the same as the way that Congress is political. The Court isn’t fielding constituent’s calls to fix bridges or making sure social security checks arrive on time. Yet making fundamental choices about who has rights and who doesn’t is deeply political.

In oral arguments, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked whether the Court would “survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?”

She’s right that there’s a stench. But it’s not because the Court is political. It’s because they won’t own up to it.

The solution isn’t for the Justices to keep whistling in the dark while insisting that they aren’t political. The dog food can may never smell good, no matter what its label says. The Court is going to have a certain stench of its own until it comes clean about the politics of constitutional interpretation.

VISIBLE MagazineSusan Burgess | VISIBLE Magazine

Lock Them Up? 1/6 Insurrectionists Need Sentences Similar to Eco-terrorists

U.S. SCOTUS: Own Up To The Stench Of Politics as Usual And Historical