After previously vowing that he would not be pressured into pleading guilty to an offense he didn’t commit, Robin Webb enter a guilty plead to a charge of trespassing on the grounds of Huntingdon Life Sciences during a December 1 protest.
Webb entered the guilty plea after his lawyer failed to convince a judge to overturn the indictment against him. Webb was fined $1,000 by Superior Court Judge Edward M. Coleman.
Webb maintains he plead guilty simply to put the episode behind him,
I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of contravening a court order or any American law. I had to plead guilty for purely tactical reasons to bring this period of unwanted exile to an end.
. . .
I’ve been away from my home country, away from my family, for three months. [The court] refused to even allow me home for my birthday and the new year over a 10-day period. With that kind of vindictiveness — and it is undoubtedly vindictiveness on behalf of the court system here — I have had to succumb to what is nothing less than blackmail.
That’s pretty amusing talk coming from a spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front who has openly endorsed violence and intimidation by animal rights activists. In fact, Webb defended animal rights extremism in speeches he gave over the past couple months while his legal situation was being resolved.
In a speech given at Virginia Tech on February 20, 2003, for example, Webb defended animal rights terrorism saying,
We’re condemned to use imperfect methods in an imperfect world history will show that [animal rights activists] were right to break the law in pursuit of the ultimate liberation, animal liberation.
So in other words, Webb had no intention of violating the law while in the United States, but even if he had, the laws don’t apply to people like Webb whom only history can judge.
Webb also played nicely into PETA’s “Holocaust on a Plate” campaign, describing efforts to genetically modify animals thusly,
Genetic modification is one step toward what Hitler was trying to create in the concentration camps. To me, it’s becoming a caricature of the mad scientist.
As opposed to being a caricature of a logical argument, which much of the animal rights movement has been reduced to.
Sources:
Animal ‘liberator’ advocates radicalism. The CollegiateTimes.Com, February 21, 2003.
Animal-rights activist can leave U.S.. Crissa Shoemaker, Home News Tribune (New Jersey), March 7, 2003.