Defense Quashes Key Evidence in White Supremacist Trial

Lawyers for the defense of key white supremacists on trial in Fort Smith, Ark., succeeded Thursday in quashing portions of a videotape made inside the Idaho compound of the Aryan Nations showing trainees shooting at cutouts of Menachem Begin’s face.

Attorneys N.C. Deday Larene and Everett Hofmeister contested as irrelevant to the proceedings segments of a videotape made by Peter Lake, an investigative reporter who had briefly infiltrated the Aryan Nations compound in 1983.

Larene is representing Robert Miles, 63, former Ku Klux Klan leader who heads the Mountain Church of Jesus Christ the Saviour in Cohoctah, Mich. Hofmeister is representing Rev. Richard Butler, 69, the so-called pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian of the Aryan Nations near Hayden Lake, Idaho.

Butler and Miles are charged with plotting violent acts that would lead to the overthrow of the United States government. The two are among 10 men charged with seditious conspiracy.

The defense attorneys claimed the footage was not relevant because it did not apply to their clients.

CROSS-BURNING SHOWN

But the judge overruled another defense motion to disallow portions of the videotape portraying a cross-burning in a southern California canyon, because the arrests of those allegedly responsible are still being litigated, according to Leonard Zeskind, research director of the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal, who is attending the trial.

The government also succeeded Thursday in showing parts of the videotape that depict Butler conferring “Aryan warrior” status on two young men.

Larene told the jury of 10 men and two women that although his client “advocates racial separation,” such endorsement never crossed into criminal activity.

In completing its opening statements Thursday, the defense told the jury in federal district court that the defendants were being persecuted for their unpopular beliefs that support racial purity and oppose the U.S. government, which they call the “Zionist Occupational Government” and claim is controlled by an international Jewish conspiracy.

FREE SPEECH RIGHTS CITED

The indicted alleged co-conspirators reiterated that they were only exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and free association by voicing beliefs ranging from support of a separate white Aryan nation in the Pacific North-west to theories that Jews are descendants of Satan and, in one statement, a religious doctrine that maintains that white people are the offspring of angels who mate with human women.

Crucial to the government’s case is an alleged meeting, held in July 1983 at the Idaho Aryan Nations compound, whose participants included Miles, Butler and Louis Beam Jr., 41, of Houston, a former “ambassador-at-large” of the Aryan Nations and former grand dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Beam set up a computer network linking right-wing racists and tax protester groups throughout the United States. The government contends that the plans for acts of counterfeiting, robbery, bombings and guerrilla warfare were laid out at this meeting.

‘BABY DIAPER CONSPIRACY’

Beam, in his statement to the jury, called the alleged seditious conspiracy “the baby diaper conspiracy,” because he claimed that at the time of the discussions he was in a bedroom changing his child’s diapers and did not hear any talk of criminal activities.

Beam, who was a fugitive until his arrest in Mexico in November 1987, acknowledged he is “a political heretic,” but said he “was under the impression that I could say what I wanted to say.”

Beam and several other defendant are serving as their own attorneys. Five men made their own statements, five had their attorneys represent them and four withheld statements until after the prosecution presents its case.

In addition to the 10 charged with seditious conspiracy, five defendants are separately charged with conspiracy to kill Federal District Judge H. Franklin Waters and special FBI agent Jack Knox. The prosecution asserts that this scheme was terminated when the conspirators’ van, loaded with weapons, was involved in an accident.