AETA setback part of lengthy legal process (Nature Magazine)‏
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Sent: July 21, 2010 1:34:04 PM
Nature Magazine
Animal rights 'terror' law challenged
Targeted researchers support the legislation, despite free-speech concerns.
Emma Marris
20 July 2010
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100720/full/466424a.html A tough but rarely invoked US law intended to protect researchers from
violent and threatening animal-rights activists has stumbled out of
the starting gate: last week, a judge dismissed the first prosecution
under the law. The decision comes on top of evidence that the
legislation has done little to deter illegal incidents, and concerns
that it risks restricting free speech.
Yet researchers who have been targeted by activists mostly support the
law and wish that it would be enforced more often and more
aggressively. "You could present this as a setback," says John Ngai, a
neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the
university's spokesman on animal research issues. "But this is one
step in a lengthy process. The wheels of justice grind really slowly."
The 2008 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), which replaces a less
powerful statute, is designed to help end campaigns of harassment
against academic scientists. It outlaws property damages at
universities and threats that produce a 'reasonable fear' of death or
injury for researchers or their relatives.
The law's first major test came in February 2009, when four
animal-rights activists Adriana Stumpo, Nathan Pope, Joseph
Buddenberg and Maryam Khajavi were arrested and later indicted under
the AETA, for incidents at the homes of several University of
California system researchers in 2007 and 2008. The group, with other
protesters, wore bandanas over their faces and wrote messages such as
"Stop the Torture", "Bird Killer" and "Murder for Scientific Lies" on
the pavement with blue and purple chalk, according to police reports.
The protesters allegedly burst through a researcher's door and one of
them hit her husband with an object. But on 12 July, a federal judge dismissed the indictment for being too
vague: prosecutors did not say which of the activists' alleged actions
violated the law. However, prosecutors are free to re-indict
if they
can show how particular actions crossed the line.Is this judge senile??? They burst into a home & hit the home owner on the HEAD?? What imaginary line is worst then that in trying to terrorize someone?? By classing animal-activist crimes as 'terrorism', the statute has
succeeded in bringing more law-enforcement resources to bear on the
issue, especially from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, says
Frankie Trull, president of the pro-animal-research National
Association for Biomedical Research (NABR) in Washington DC.
Yet Trull has been disappointed with the results so far. Several
dangerous crimes remain unsolved, including the firebombing of a house
and car belonging to researchers in Santa Cruz, California, in 2008,
and the March 2009 torching of a car belonging to David Jentsch, a
neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
"Why aren't they arresting these guys?" asks Trull. "It is hard to
believe that these extremists are so sophisticated that they don't
leave any trail."
There are also few signs that the law has been a deterrent. The number
of illegal incidents fluctuates wildly (see 'Wrongs in the name of
animal rights'), and analyses by groups on both sides of the issue
the NABR and the activist-sympathizing Bite Back magazine show no
clear effect on the number or nature of attacks since the AETA was
passed.
Most law-enforcement efforts against animal rights-related crimes in
the past decade rely on other legislation. In California, which sees
the bulk of US attacks, the state's Researcher Protection Act of 2008
has made it a misdemeanour to publish the names and locations of
researchers to encourage crimes against them. Under other state laws,
UCLA has been granted injunctions that ban several activists from
approaching researchers' homes. Activists have also been successfully
pursued under anti-stalking laws.
The strong language of the AETA which in the Berkeley case raises
freedom of speech issues, the judge warned could be making
prosecutors wary of using it. Lawyers for the defendants say that much
of the activists' activity chalking, chanting and leafleting
should be considered protected 'speech', and therefore be exempt from
restriction. According to Michael Macleod-Ball, chief legislative
counsel of the New York-based American Civil Liberties Union,
"Prosecutors need to be careful about how they use this, because the
language in the statute is a little squishy."
Researchers who have been the target of attacks don't want prosecutors
to give up yet. Jentsch endured lengthy protests at his home after the
burning of his car. He thinks that the AETA could deter protesters who
are "actively seeking the boundary of protected speech" to harm
researchers without getting arrested. But this won't happen until
there are more AETA arrests. "I don't see that the AETA has really
affected activists yet," says Jentsch. "It has got to be used to
aggressively pursue people who have pushed the bounds of behaviour."
CORRECTED: An earlier version of this story incorrectly implied that
the incidents for which animal rights activists were arrested involved
only researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact,
researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, were also
targeted.
Maybe the laws are weak because the judges are to mentally screwed up to see that the crimes deserve swift and realistic sentencing for the ones charged..