THE LEDGER-STAR
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 3, 1994 TAG: 9410030207
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY RONALD SMOTHERS, NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: PENSACOLA, FLA. LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
The first major federal trial involving the four-month-old law designed to curb violent and disruptive demonstrations at abortion clinics began today in the case of a 40-year-old former minister charged in the shooting deaths of an abortion doctor and his bodyguard.
The trial of Paul Hill comes just two months after he was arrested in the deaths of Dr. John Britton, 69, and James Barrett, 74, who were killed with a shotgun as they sat in a parked car outside the Pensacola Ladies Clinic on July 29. And it comes well before the state trial on murder charges, in which a guilty verdict could mean the death penalty.
Even though the details of the case remain fresh in the memories of many people, the trial threatens to be a murky and confusing affair rather than a defining moment in the early history of the federal law.
For one thing, Hill, in the weeks leading up to the trial, had dismissed his court-appointed lawyer for trying to enter an insanity plea and then said he would employ the legal argument that his acts were justified to prevent the deaths of babies.
When the trial judge temporarily barred that argument, Hill hurriedly rehired the lawyer late Friday, throwing his legal strategy into question for now.
Lawyers in the case are under an order not to discuss it.
The swiftness of the first prosecution under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances law has been unanimously and loudly applauded by abortion rights supporters around the country.
They said the prosecution highlights a new determination among federal officials to control violence growing out of the battle over abortion rights. Such a determination, they said, was not evident in the years of the Reagan and Bush administrations, when dozens of clinics were firebombed or blockaded and their workers intimidated and assaulted.
``For the 12 years before this current administration, the silence at the executive level actually contributed to the extremist feelings of the anti-abortion movement, legitimized and gave license to the use of some extreme tactics,'' said Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League. ``This trial sends a very different message.''
Patricia Ireland, the director of the National Organization for Women, agreed. She added, ``If we can't get a firm and clean conviction'' in a case that involves a killing at a clinic, ``then it might signal that there will be problems in the future in prosecuting lesser forms of intimidation.''
The same unanimity does not exist among opponents of abortion. The case has bared divisions that appear to be part theological, part philosophical and part tactical.
For some, like the Rev. Flip Benham, it is a meaningless and nettlesome ``showcase trial'' being staged by the abortion rights supporters inside and outside the Clinton administration to portray their movement as more about ``Conan the Messiah than Jesus the Messiah.''
Benham is the national director of Operation Rescue, the group that has staged scores of protests and blockades at clinics nationally.
``This trial is nothing but a showcase to say that Christians can't be trusted around abortion mills and to stop us from demonstrating,'' said Benham, who is based in Dallas.
``The media invented Paul Hill as a pro-life leader so that with broad-brush strokes they could paint all of Christendom with his wild-eyed lunacy.''
But Roy McMillan, the director of the Christian Action Group, an organization based in Jackson, Miss., with which the defendant was once allied, is disdainful of those in the anti-abortion movement who would distance themselves from Hill.
McMillan sees in the defendant the white-hot abolitionist fervor of a John Brown, and he said Hill was forcing society to confront ``the dissonance of abortion.''
``Those pro-life people who want to put distance between themselves and Paul Hill are betraying the child as a human being, and they have put Caesar before God,'' he said. ``And I think they have misjudged the sentiments of the grassroots of the movement, who see the reasoning behind shooting a professional assassin going into a building to perform his work.''
Hill had publicly argued that killing abortion doctors is justifiable homicide. ILLUSTRATION: Ex-minister Paul Hill is charged in the shooting deaths of an
abortion doctor and his bodyguard.
KEYWORDS: ABORTION by CNB