|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Miscellaneous |
|
$4.4 million for Environmentalists framed by FBI |
Current rating: 0 |
by The Guardian via DJM
(No verified email address) |
12 Jun 2002
Modified: 13 Jun 2002 |
|
Two radical environmentalists were awarded $4.4m in damages yesterday after a jury in California agreed that nine FBI agents and police officers tried to frame them for planting a bomb in 1990 that destroyed the activists' own car. |
$4.4m for environmentalists framed by FBI
Victory comes five years after death of woman wrongly accused of planting bomb in her own car
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles and Oliver Burkeman in New York
Wednesday June 12, 2002
The Guardian
Two radical environmentalists were awarded $4.4m in damages yesterday after a jury in California agreed that nine FBI agents and police officers tried to frame them for planting a bomb in 1990 that destroyed the activists' own car.
The unprecedented award to Darryl Cherney, and to the estate of Judi Bari, who died of cancer in 1997, came after 17 days of deliberations in a case that became a cause célèbre among US environmentalists.
"This was the moment of truth," a tearful Mr Cherney told the Guardian last night. "It shows that even in the post-September 11 era, the FBI can be taken to task for violating the civil rights of Americans."
Bari's pelvis was crushed and Mr Cherney was also hurt when a motion-triggered pipe bomb exploded in Bari's car.
The pair had been working on a campaign against the "liquidation logging" of redwood. Before the bombing, Bari had reported death threats to the police but from the start the focus of the FBI investigation was on the pair themselves.
They were arrested within hours and the media were told that Bari was believed to have been transporting the bomb to carry out environmental sabotage and tipped off that evidence had been found to link the pair to the bomb. No such evidence was presented in court and the case collapsed when the district attorney declined to press charges.
"Judi Bari and I were the victims of terrorism, but because the FBI and the Oakland police disagreed with our place on the political spectrum, they accused us of bombing our selves," Mr Cherney said.
A year after the blast, Bari and Mr Cherney brought a civil rights action against the FBI and Oakland police, accusing six FBI agents and three Oakland officers of false arrest, unlawful search and seizure and violating their civil rights.
The thrust of the action was that officials had never properly investigated the explosion because of their assumption that it was the environmentalists' own bomb. At the heart of the case was the accusation that the FBI set out to smear the two with bogus evidence when its investigation failed to produce any leads.
Environmental campaigners in the Oakland courtroom cheered as charges of false arrest, slanderous statements and illegal search were upheld against six of the seven defendants, though the jury rejected the charges of conspiracy.
The activists' lawyer, Dennis Cunningham, said: "[The FBI] framed Judi and Darryl...The bombs struck at them and then the law enforcement struck at them; when [Bari] didn't die, they did a character assassination."
Many attempts were made by the defence lawyers to have the case struck out. When it finally came to court in April, much of the defence was concerned with the dangers posed by terrorism.
Before she died, Bari said: "This case is about the rights of all political activists to engage in dissent without having to fear the government's secret police." Her evidence was given in the form of a videotape recording.
What still remains a mystery is who actually planted the bomb. Even those who disagreed with Bari accept that she was no bomber. Bari herself always maintained publicly that it must have been planted by logging interests, the far right or even the FBI.
She and Mr Cherney argued that investigators ignored a letter received by a local newspaper, providing details of the bomb's construction and saying it was planted in revenge for Bari's abortion-rights campaigning. The writer claimed to be "the Lord's avenger".
The $4.4m (£3m) is made up of compensatory awards, which must be paid by the FBI and the Oakland police, and a punitive award made against the defendants personally, though it is likely that their unions will foot that bill. |
|
Earth First! and the FBI: What the Verdict Means |
by Institute for Public Accuracy
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Jun 2002
|
WASHINGTON - June 12 - Twelve years after Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari were arrested for the bombing of their own car, a jury awarded them $4.4 million Tuesday in their suit against the FBI and the Oakland Police for framing them.
DARRYL CHERNEY, DENNIS CUNNINGHAM, littletree (at) pacific.net, http://www.judibari.org
In 1990, Cherney was injured in a car bombing along with fellow Earth First! activist Judi Bari. The two were arrested when the FBI claimed that they had planted the bomb. All charges against Bari and Cherney were later dropped. Cherney sued the FBI. So did Bari, who later died of cancer. Dennis Cunningham, the lead counsel in Bari vs. the FBI, has also represented the family of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was slain by Chicago police at the instigation of the FBI. Cunningham said today: "In a legal victory of historic proportions against the FBI, the jury found that six of the seven defendants violated the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution by arresting the activists, conducting searches of their homes, and carrying out a smear campaign in the press, calling Earth First! a terrorist organization and calling the activists bombers in the aftermath of the explosion of a bomb that was planted in Judi Bari's car in 1990. This verdict is a referendum against the FBI's gross interference with people's right to dissent at a time when Attorney General Ashcroft, FBI Director Mueller and the Bush administration are arrogating huge power to themselves and the FBI to spy on legitimate groups and organizers and infringe on Constitutional rights of the public."
NKECHI TAIFA, ntaifa (at) law.howard.edu, http://www.law.howard.edu/faculty/pages/ntaifa
Taifa is director of the Equal Justice Program at the Howard University School of Law. She said today: "This jury verdict is yet another indication of what is in store should Ashcroft's plans to loosen the longstanding Levi guidelines become a reality. The guidelines were implemented to curb FBI abuses uncovered during the Senate investigations of the mid-'70s. The 1990 Bari bomb fiasco occurred despite the existence of these clear guidelines prohibiting such outrageous activity by the FBI. What will be the limits of governmental abuse if there are no guidelines in place?"
PAUL WOLF, paulwolf (at) derechos.org, http://www.cointel.org
Principal author of the report "COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story," Wolf said today: "Despite its carefully contrived image as the nation's premier crime-fighting agency, the FBI has always functioned primarily as America's political police. This role has included not only the collection of intelligence on the activities of political dissidents and groups, but also counterintelligence operations to thwart those activities.... There is no better example than the Judi Bari case to show that the FBI kept on well into the 1990s using covert action tactics against political movements and activists which they perceived as threats to the established order.... In spite of knowing full well from their own expert's testimony that Bari and Cherney were innocent victims, the FBI and Oakland police continued to lie to the media ... saying they had plenty of evidence they were the bombers."
http://www.accuracy.org |
