Judge denies "choice of evils" defense (All Christine Trial Updates)

ROSEBURG, Ore. (AP) -- A judge ruled Thursday that Ruth and Brian Christine cannot use a "choice of evils" defense against charges they took their three daughters at gunpoint from state child welfare workers.

The ruling undermines defense attorney Edgar Steele's plan to argue the couple was rescuing their children from a rogue state agency.

Judge William Lasswell said the threat to the Christines' three young daughters from being in foster care did not exceed the threat posed by the crimes the Christines are accused of.

"I do not believe this case as I have heard it so far ... meets that test," Lasswell said of Steele's planned "choice of evils" defense. "The children's services department was acting in a lawful way."

Brian Christine allegedly pointed a gun at state social workers driving the three girls -- Bethany, then 5, Lydia, 3, and Miriam, 2 -- back to a foster home following a visit with their parents on Aug. 1.

The Christines, both 29, are on trial in Douglas County court on charges of kidnapping, robbery, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and custodial interference.

The state alleges that last August, a year after the Department of Human Services took the three girls into foster care to protect them from their parents, Brian Christine took the girls from a state social worker, met up with his wife and a friend, and escaped to Montana, where they were found within days.

Lasswell added that his ruling will not prevent Steele from offering evidence supporting his rescue argument but there will be no instruction to the jury that they can find the Christines innocent based on a "choice of evils" defense.

Lasswell left the door open for the defense to argue that the Christines were under such stress at the loss of custody of the three girls that their state of mind and capacity to tell right from wrong were affected.

Lasswell also denied a defense motion to suppress evidence the children were malnourished and one had been knocked down stairs by her father.

When police first confronted them on July 31, 2000, the judge said, the expectation of privacy inside a motor home in a public parking lot was not the same as that in a cottage in the woods with a fence around it and "No Trespassing" signs.

Lasswell rejected the Christines' testimony that they gave permission to a police officer to board the converted bus and talk to their children under coercion.

Following the rulings, jury selection began and was expected to last throughout the day Thursday.

A LOOK INTO THE ABYSS What Elian Tells Us About Ourselves

By Edward Zehr

"They have become, in the fullest sense of the term, Weimar Republicans."

Oh no, the reader thinks upon seeing the subtitle of this piece, not another article about Elian. But this series of articles is only incidentally about Elian -- it's really about us and what is... happening ---to us. The Elian affair is like a mirror that reflects our hidden face, the one we never identify with ourselves because we always imagine that it belongs to somebody else.

For example, I get e-mail from people who have chanced to read one or more of these articles and drop me a cordial line or two just to let me know what a numbskull I am. After all, the way I tell the story is not the way they have heard it. If my version were correct it would mean that they have been grossly misinformed, and the implications of that are too terrible to contemplate.

It would mean that in order to be properly informed they would have to stop skating over the surface of issues such as these, letting the anchor people do all the heavy lifting, and start doing their own thinking. But thinking can be kind of like work. Besides, a lot of people just don't quite have the hang of it. The raw material required to do one's own thinking consists of facts gathered from a wide variety of sources, not just the one that happens to materialize when the TV set is switched on.

The "facts" presented by the mass media are typically folded into a smarmy batter of tendentious fiction calculated to elicit a response from the viewer that will be useful in advancing the hidden agenda which the presstitutes are paid to promote. The viewer, who does not comprehend that he or she is being manipulated responds emotionally, as though watching a soap opera or a TV series. After all, most people have a lot more experience responding emotionally to TV plots than they have at thinking critically and analytically. The script writer manipulates the emotions of the audience who respond in a predictable fashion. The viewers are being conditioned to react in a certain way. The leap from the semi-conscious emotional response evoked by TV "entertainment" to the conditioned response elicited by the politically motivated propaganda inserted into "news" presentations is a short one.

THE FACE IN THE MIRROR

The black-shirted, brown-shirted and red-banner-waving totalitarians of the twentieth century missed the point on a grand scale. All that rough stuff is really unnecessary in building a totalitarian state. In fact, if overdone, it tends to give the game away. Goebbels was the one who had it right, not Himmler. Concentration camps are a drain on the economy. That doesn't mean that you cannot turn the occasional group of retrograde religious fundies into crispy critters if they offer sufficient provocation. (It adds to the entertainment value of the spectacle if you torment the kiddies with noxious gas for, oh say five or six hours prior to lighting the bonfire -- the imperial Romans knew about these things). After the flames subside it will all be seen as the fault of the fundies, of course. That sinister, shadowy countenance we sometimes catch sight of, however fleetingly, in the mirror is never our own.

Not that the knock on the door in the middle of the night is completely passe. In fact, it can prove quite useful if the courts insist upon being tedious about due process and all that nausea, and balk at issuing the legal paperwork necessary to drag away the designated victim in strict conformance with the law. No matter, hardly anyone understands the law, and who is going to tell them -- the press? They are far too preoccupied writing puff-pieces about Janet Reno to shed any tears over the late, great Fourth Amendment. Mind you, the original Gestapo were such sticklers for observing regulations they actually used to knock before entering. (Germans tend to be polite almost to a fault -- they would never dream of using the familiar form of the personal pronoun with a stranger, even if they were bashing his head in). Our own ski-masked, ninja-clad mili-cops do their nocturnal knocking with a battering ram. Small wonder Europeans consider us to be somewhat gauche.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of the Elian affair is the public's response to Reno's Raid on the Miami family of Elian Gonzalez, in which the boy was illegally seized and whisked away to a secluded stronghold where, according to some accounts, he is being drugged and indoctrinated by his Cuban communist keepers. Ah! smirk the Clinton/Castro apologists, you don't know that the kid is being drugged and indoctrinated. But the evidence for this is already considerable and is accumulating rapidly. The troubling thing is that the apologists do not know that the kid is NOT being drugged and indoctrinated, and what's worse, they don't even seem to care. What this amounts to is a desecration of everything this country is supposed to stand for. The indifference of the public to such an obscene spectacle bodes ill for the survival of liberty.

The online news site NewsMax.com recently reported the observations of Robert K. Ressler, who has been in law enforcement for more than 40 years, half of that time with the FBI. Ressler said that his contacts within the Bureau have indicated that the FBI was opposed to the raid and declined Reno's invitation to participate in it. The former FBI agent was particularly critical of what he considers to be the excessive use of force. He believes that the feds were determined to "make a statement" to the Cuban-American community in Miami, but the risks involved were out of proportion to the ends achieved. "The Cuban-Americans showed great constraint," said Ressler. "Considering what the federal government did, you could have had a disaster with many people killed."

Of course, it would not have been the first time Janet Reno precipitated a disaster through her impetuous use of poor judgement (if that's what it was). Ressler mentioned Reno's mishandling of the Waco siege which resulted in the deaths of 86 people, two dozen of them children. And then there was her department's slovenly, botched oversight of the ham-handed attempt to frame Richard Jewell, and its bungled investigation of the Ruby Ridge case. The attempted framing of White House Travel Office chief Billy Dale is in keeping with this trend. The former G-man might also have mentioned Reno's record as a witch-hunter while serving as a prosecutor in Florida. Janet made her bones there by trying people for "child abuse" and often succeeded in sending innocent people to prison for that offense. This was, at the time, a fashionable cause to shrieking demagogues in the mainstream media, although they have since lowered their voices on the subject after it became obvious that numerous miscarriages of justice had resulted from their rabid, politically correct hysteria. Needless to say, this is cold comfort to those who are still rotting away in prison for trumped-up offenses they did not commit. The big question that comes to mind is why Bill Clinton wanted a witch-hunter to be his attorney general.

Ressler ticked off the list of blunders committed by Reno, who he says violated virtually every major rule for handling a crisis. First the negotiations were cut short. Reno has yet to explain her pressing need to risk the lives of everyone involved by resorting to force before the possibilities for a negotiated settlement had been exhausted. She made the same "mistake" at Waco with tragic results.

By violating her word that she would not use force to resolve the situation while negotiations were ongoing, Reno set a dangerous precedent, says Ressler. "In the future, if there is a real hostage situation involving Cuban-Americans in the Miami area, they will not believe the government during negotiations, and his could lead to disaster."

The excessive use of force in order to make a statement entailed unnecessary risks, says Ressler. More than 130 federal agents were involved in Reno's raid. How would he have handled it? Ressler was quoted by NewsMax as saying, "I would have sent just two marshals wearing suits, with briefcases, and maybe with a social worker to collect the child. If that effort failed or resistance was met, only then should the have been escalated."

The point being glossed over here is that the federal government did not have the requisite legal authority to seize Elian, but I suppose Ressler does not consider that to be his department. What does seem to concern him is the reckless and unnecessary risk to life and limb taken by the Clinton administration and the Justice Department just to make the point that their every whim is our command. He ridiculed the Justice Department's claim that some people in nearby dwellings might have had guns, pointing out that this is going to be true in any crisis situation and does not provide a valid excuse for the abuse of the government's power. Ressler summed up his impressions, saying:

"The photo [of the agent seizing the boy at gunpoint] said everything. It's amazing to me that this can happen in America, to have civilian rights trampled on, and for no one in the media or Congress wanting to hold Reno accountable. Its very frightening to me."

THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM

A more recent development is the emergence of anti-Cuban hate- mongers who gather in Miami on weekends with signs and banners that proclaim "Cubans go home," "one down, 800,000 to go," and similar sentiments. The rallies are organized by a man referred to by the Miami Herald as "a self-described redneck" who has spent nearly a year in jail after being convicted on three counts of "sex offenses against a child."

A local attorney who describes himself as a "blonde, third generation American of Irish, German and Greek descent, who was born and grew up in Miami," took out a full-page ad in the Miami Herald last week to convey a message that reads in part:

"The disturbing irony is that these "pro-USA" hate-mongers are condemning people who have struggled to uphold the very values of liberty and justice that the American flag symbolizes, and which Cuban Americans have sacrificed to uphold. Cuban-Americans have proven their dedication to American values in many ways. First, by rejecting an oppressive, totalitarian communist dictator, and giving up everything they once had to live in freedom and democracy. Then, more recently, by trying to save a little boy from that same political oppression after his courageous mother died tragically in her own search for freedom. Sadly, most Anglo Americans do not fully appreciate this fact, because most of us have been fortunate enough not to have lived under political oppression."

The big picture!

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