Month: February 2003

ELF Terrorist Sentenced to Prison

Earth Liberation Front terrorist Jacob Sherman was sentenced to more than three years in prison this month after he plead guilty to the 2001 firebombing of logging trucks and logging equipment in Oregon.

Those fires did $50,000 in damage at Ray A. Schopper Logging and $210,000 in damage at Ross Island Sand & Gravel.

Although the maximum possible sentence was 40 years, the judge in the case was apparently lenient due to Sherman’s cooperation with authorities after his arrest. According to court documents, Sherman began cooperating immediately with authorities and identified Michael Scarpitti aka Tre Arrow as being the ringleader of the group responsible for the arsons.

Scarpitti is currently a fugitive.

Sources:

Fire bombing eco-terrorist sentenced. Associated Press, February 20, 2003.

Eco-terrorist convicted for more than three years in prison. KATU News, February 20, 2003.

Organ Donation: Should National Origin Matter?

I didn’t really follow the Jesica Santillan case very closely, and missed an interesting fact about Santillan — she was apparently in the United States illegally. According to a number of reports, her mother smuggled her into the country hoping that she would receive better care in the United States than in Mexico.

Doing a Google search on Santillan turns up a number of opinions on this state of affairs. There’s the hardcore anti-immigrant folks who think Santillan’s case is a tragedy because it will just encourage more people from Mexico to take the often dangerous step of illegally crossing the border. There’s also plenty of sentiment that it doesn’t matter — here’s a young woman who needed a transplant, and her nationality be damned.

Of course Santillan is a very sympathetic figure. In the 1980s, there was less sympathy for a number of wealthy foreign nationals — including the wife of a prominent Saudi Arabian diplomat — who came to the United States for organ transplants.

In response United Network for Organ Sharing decreed that transplant centers must limit to 5 percent the number of transplants they do for foreign nationals. In 2002, 936 of the 22,709 organ transplants operations in the United States were performed on foreign nationals.

One of the major problems with this system us that UNOS appears to have no serious guidelines for deciding when an organ should go to a foreign national over a U.S. citizen. The American Society of Transplant Surgeons proposed giving U.S. citizens first shot at any organs, with foreign nationals qualifying only if there were no citizens who could take the organ (and, to be fair, something like that appears to have happened in the Santillan case), but UNOS appears to have never formally adopted that guideline, leaving such decisions up to whatever policies transplant centers themselves want to formulate.

Sources:

Immigration, organ issues mix: Medical community faces quandary of who is most deserving recipient. Scott Dodd, Charlotte Observer, February 21, 2003.

Animal Activist's Defamation Lawsuit Thrown Out Again

A judge this month dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by Wisconsin-based animal rights group Animal Lobby Inc. against radio talk show host Charlie Sykes.

Animal Lobby Inc.’s Schultz sued Sykes and others in January 1998 after newspapers and radio coverage named her as a suspect in a dognapping case and also linked her to a sting operation at a Wisconsin farm. Schultz was charged in the dognapping case, but all charges were later dropped.

Schultz’s defamation case was dismissed after Circuit Judge Francis Wasielewski ruled that Schultz had suborned perjury from another witness. Schultz had asked a friend to lie on her behalf, and coached the friend on how to testify in court. Schultz denied that she had suborned perjury, but the friend produced a typewritten script that Schultz admitted writing that detailed how the friend should answer questions she might be asked at the trial.

Animal Lobby Inc. then filed suit against Sykes arguing that it as an organization had been defamed. A state appeals court reinstated one charge related to the sting operation at the Wisconsin farm which Sykes falsely reported Schultz was involved in.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Timothy Dugan dismissed that claim earlier this month, finding that when Schultz was acting as an agent of Animal Lobby Inc. when she attempted to suborn perjury. He also fined Animal Lobby Inc. $100.

Schultz told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that she plans to appeal the ruling.

Source:

Activist’s complaint dismissed. Tom Held, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, February 6, 2003.

Edmonton Rejects Ban on Circus Animals

Earlier this month the Edmonton City Council rejected a proposed ban on circus animals by a vote of 8-4.

The proposed ban had threatened the 55th annual Shrine circus scheduled for Edmonton from March 7-9. Bruce Hogle, a spokesman for the Al Shamal Shriners, told The Edmonton Journal,

We are ecstatic about this. We’ll continue to entertain thousands of children from Edmonton, central and northern Alberta. The animals are well taken care of. We’ve never been charged by the Edmonton or Alberta SPCA. We’ve never been warned by any organization.

Tove Reece of Voice of Animals, one of the groups supporting the proposed ban, told The Edmonton Journal that the vote was a “huge loss for animals” and urged people not to go to the circus.

Edmonton City Councillor Ron Hayter attacked the proposal and accused the activists of engaging in “misleading propaganda.” The Edmonton Journal reported that Hayter said,

It’s [the proposed ban] an attempt of the few to impose their idea of what is right on the many. I don’t like their tactics, their efforts to confuse and mislead. In my 25 years on council, I have learned to ignore the shrill voices of fanatics.

Source:

Councillor claws animal rights activists: Circus animals won’t be banned. Bob Gilmour, The Edmonton Journal, February 12, 2003.

A Man’s Right to Choose?

A few weeks ago, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade which gave women the right to make a range of reproductive choices, Glenn Sacks wrote an cogent summary of the arguments for a men’s right to choose. Sacks writes,

When a woman gets pregnant she has the right to decide whether or not to carry the baby to term, and whether to raise the child herself or to give it up for adoption. In many states she can even terminate all parental responsibility by returning the baby to the hospital within a few weeks of birth. Yet if she decides she wants the child, she can demand 18 years of child support from the father, and he has no choice in the matter. When it comes to reproduction, in America today women have rights and men merely have responsibilities.

. . .

The “Choice for Men” movement seeks to give fathers the right to relinquish their parental rights and responsibilities within a month of learning of a pregnancy, just as mothers do when they choose to give their children up for adoption. These men would be obligated to provide legitimate financial compensation to cover pregnancy-related medical expenses and the mother’s loss of income during pregnancy. The right would only apply to pregnancies which occurred outside of marriage, and women would still be free to exercise all of the reproductive choices they have now.

At the moment there is almost no support outside of the men’s movement for such ideas, but as Cathy Young noted in an article on this topic a couple years ago, it is a direct outgrowth of feminist claims about the importance of abortion rights. Young wrote,

. . . Advocates of choice for men like to cite a passage from a Planned Parenthood statement, “9 Reasons Why Abortions Are Legal”: “At the most basic level, the abortion issue is not really about abortion. … Should women make their own decisions about family, career and how to live their lives? Or should government do that for them? Do women have the option of deciding when or whether to have children?”

Substitute “men” for “women,” and it’s hard to deny that coerced fatherhood drastically curtails a man’s ability to make key decisions about how to live his life, including when or whether to have children with the woman he loves. Think of “A Dad Too Soon,” the young husband saddled with college loans, graduate school tuition, car payments and other expenses, and forced to give up a quarter of his earnings because he made a mistake as a teenager. (His admittedly one-sided narrative also suggests that the mother’s paternity suit was partly driven by vindictiveness: Having waited for eight years, she filed the claim days after his wedding.) Yet, in the eyes of Ann Landers and many others, he deserves only a stern rebuke. Pay up and shut up. You play, you pay. It takes two to tango.

. . .

Yet, by and large, feminists and pro-choice activists have not been sympathetic to calls for men’s reproductive freedom. “If there is a birth, the man has an obligation to support the child,” says Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center. “The distinction with respect to abortion is the physical toll that it takes on a woman to carry a fetus to term, which doesn’t have any translation for men. Once the child is born, neither can walk away from the obligations of parenthood.” (Actually, a woman can give up the child for adoption, often without the father’s consent, and be free of any further obligation.)

Indeed, on the issue of choice for men, staunch supporters of abortion rights can sound like an eerie echo of the other side: “They have a choice — use condoms, get sterilized or keep their pants on.” “They should think about the consequences before they have sex.” (The irony is not lost on men’s choice advocates or pro-lifers.) Yes, some admit, it’s unfair that women still have a choice after conception and men don’t, but biology isn’t fair. As a male friend of mine succinctly put it, “Them’s the breaks.”

Clearly there are some inequities that need to be eliminated, such as relief for men who end up being fathers thanks to the fraudulent and/or criminal actions of unscrupulous women, as well as men who are forced to pay child support for children they later find out they are not biologically related to, but going beyond that opens a can of worms that warrants proceeding very slowly.

Source:

30 years after Roe v. Wade, How About Choice for Men?. Glenn Sacks, MensNewsDaily.Com, January 22, 2003.

Washington State to Address Holes in Anti-Voyeurism Laws

One of the more bizarre legal outcomes relating to privacy last year had to be a Washington state’s ruling that two men who pointed cameras up women’s skirts in public places were not guilty of violating the state’s anti-voyeurism laws.

The men had surreptitiously used video cameras to film women and girls at a shopping mall and at an outdoor festival. They were charged with violating anti-voyeurism statutes, but a state court ruled that the law governing such crimes did not ban such practices in public places.

Washington State Rep. Patricia Lantz told Reuters,

In the previous (anti-voyeurism) bill, we didn’t consider the remote possibility that jerks would go around filming up the skirts of women.

. . .

As nasty as it is to the victims, standing over my desk and looking down my blouse is not a crime. But this bill makes it clear you have a reasonable expectation of privacy about your body and a person’s ability to film intimate areas of your body.

Source:

Law targets ‘up-skirt’ filming. Reuters, January 17, 2003.