Theocratic Sect Prays for Real Armageddon

By Casey Sanchez

Members of Joel's Army are fighting to bring about the millennial reign of Christ.

LAKELAND, Fla. -- Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous "supernatural healing revival" in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don't bat an eye when he tells them he's seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven. "He was looking very Jewish," Bentley notes.

Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read "Joel's Army." They're evidence of Bentley's generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that's gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other "hyper-charismatic" preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel's Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian "dominion" on non-believers.

"An end-time army has one common purpose -- to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion," Bentley declares on the website for his ministry school in British Columbia, Canada. "The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel's Army. ... Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God's kingdom on earth."

Joel's Army followers, many of them teenagers and young adults who believe they're members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world, are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they base their beliefs on an esoteric reading of the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Joel, in which an avenging swarm of locusts attacks Israel. In their view, the locusts are a metaphor for Joel's Army.

Despite their overt militancy, there's no evidence Joel's Army followers have committed any acts of violence. But critics warn that actual bloodletting may only be a matter of time for a movement that casts itself as God's avenging army.

Those sounding the alarm about Joel's Army are not secular foes of the Christian Right, few of whom are even aware of the movement or how widespread it's become in the past decade. Instead, Joel's Army critics are mostly conservative Christians, either neo-Pentecostals who left the movement in disgust or evangelical Christians who fear that Joel's Army preachers are stealing their flocks, even sending spies to infiltrate their own congregations and sway their young people to heresy. And they say the movement is becoming frightening.

"The pitch and intensity of the military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially increased since the beginning of 2008," writes The Discernment Research Group, a Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity. "One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual warriors."

'Snorting Religion'

Joel's Army believers are hard-core Christian dominionists, meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism.

Dominionism's original branch is Christian Reconstructionism, a grim, Calvinist call to theocracy that, as Reconstructionist writer Gary North describes, wants to "get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."

Notorious for endorsing the public execution by stoning of homosexuals and adulterers, the Christian Reconstructionist movement is far better known in secular America than Joel's Army. That's largely because Reconstructionists have made several serious forays into mainstream politics and received a fair amount of negative publicity as a result. Joel's Army followers eschew the political system, believing the path to world domination lies in taking over churches, not election to public office.

Another key difference between the two branches of dominionism, which maintain a testy, arms-length relationship with one another, is Christian Reconstructionism's buttoned-down image and heavy emphasis on Bible study, which contrasts sharply with Joel's Army anti-intellectual distrust of biblical scholars and its unruly style.

"Some people snort cocaine, others snort religions," Joel's Army Pastor Roy said while ministering a morning program at Todd Bentley's Lakeland, Fla., revival in late May.

As this article went to press, Bentley's "Florida Outpouring" had been running for more than 100 days straight. Many attendees came in search of spontaneous physical healing and a desire to be part of a mystical community marked by dancing, shouting, gyrating, speaking in tongues and other forms of ecstatic release.

Snide jabs at traditional church services are fairly common at Bentley's revivals. In fact, what takes place onstage at the Florida Outpouring looks more like a pro wrestling extravaganza than church. On stage, Bentley and his team of pastors, yell, chant, and scream "Fire!" and "Bam!" while anointing followers.

The audience members behave as if they are at a psychedelic counterculture festival. One couple jumps up and down twirling red and silver metallic flags. Dyed-haired teenagers pulled in by the revival's presence on Facebook and MySpace wander around looking dazed. Women lay facedown on the floor, convulsing and howling. Fathers wail in tongues as their confused children look on. Strangers lay hands on those who fail to produce tongues or gyrate wildly enough, pressuring them to "let it out."

Bentley is considered a prophet both by his followers and by other leaders of the Joel's Army movement, whose adherents claim to be reviving a "five-fold ministry" of prophets, apostles, elders, pastors and teachers, as outlined in the Book of Ephesians. Not every five-fold ministry is connected to the Joel's Army movement, but the movement has spurred an interest in modern-day apostles and prophets that's troubling to the Assemblies of God, the world's largest Pentecostal church, which has officially disavowed the Joel's Army movement.

In a 2001 position paper, Assemblies of God leaders wrote that they do not recognize modern-day apostles or prophets and worried that "such leaders prefer more authoritarian structures where their own word or decrees are unchallenged." They are right to worry. Joel's Army followers believe that once democratic institutions are overthrown, their hierarchy of apostles and prophets will rule over the earth, with one church per city.

Warrior Nation

According to Joel's Army doctrine, the enforcers of the five-fold ministry will be members of the final generation, for whom the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade constituted a new Passover.

"Everyone born after abortion's legalization can consider their birth a personal invitation to take part in this great army," writes John Crowder, another prominent Joel's Army pastor, who bills his 2006 book, The New Mystics: How to Become Part of the Supernatural Generation, as a literal how-to guide for joining Joel's Army.

Both Bentley and Crowder are enormously popular on Elijah's List, an online watering hole for a broad spectrum of Joel's Army enlistees, from lightweight believers who merely share an affection for military rhetoric and pastors who dress in army camouflage (several Joel's Army pastors are addressed by their congregants as "commandant" or "commander") to hardliners who believe the church is called to have an active military role in end-times that have already begun. Elijah's List currently has more than 125,000 subscribers on its electronic mailing list.

Rick Joyner, a pastor whose books, The Harvest and The Call, helped popularize Joel's Army theology by selling more than a million copies each, goes the furthest on Elijah's List in pushing the hardliner approach. In 2006, he posted a sermon called "The Warrior Nation -- The New Sound of the Church," in which he claimed that a last-day army is now gathering and called believers "freedom fighters."

"As the church begins to take on this resolve, they [Joel's Army churches] will start to be thought of more as military bases, and they will begin to take on the characteristics of military bases for training, equipping, and deploying effective spiritual forces," Joyner wrote. "In time, the church will actually be organized more as a military force with an army, navy, air force, etc."

In a sort of disclaimer, Joyner writes at one point that God's army "will bring love, peace and stability wherever they go." But several of his books narrate with glee what he describes as "a coming civil war within the church." In his 1997 book The Harvest he writes: "Some pastors and leaders who continue to resist this tide of unity will be removed from their place. Some will become so hardened they will become opposers and resist God to the end."

Two years later, in his book The Final Quest, Joyner described a vision (taken as prophecy in the Joel's Army world, where Joyner is considered an "apostle") of the coming Christian Civil War in which demon-possessed Christian soldiers enslave other, weaker Christians who resist them. He also describes how the hero of the novel -- himself -- ascends a "Holy Mountain" in order to learn new truths and to acquire new, magic weapons.

Kids on Fire

Bentley, who claims to be a supernatural healer, is no less over the top, playing his biker-punk appearance and heavy metal theatrics to the hilt. On YouTube, where clips of his most dramatic healings have been condensed into a three-minute highlight reel, Bentley describes God ordering him to kick an elderly lady in the face: "I am thinking, 'God, why is the power of God not moving?' And He said, 'It is because you haven't kicked that women in the face.' And there was, like, this older lady worshipping right in front of the platform and the Holy Spirit spoke to me and the gift of faith came on me. He said, 'Kick her in the face ... with your biker boot.' I inched closer and I went like this [makes kicking motion]: Bam! And just as my boot made contact with her nose, she fell under the power of God."

The atmosphere is less charged with violence at "The Call," a 12-hour revival of up to 20,000 youths led by Joel's Army pastor Lou Engle and held every summer in a major American city (this year's event was scheduled for Washington, D.C. in August).

Attendees are called upon to fast and pray for 40 days and take up culture-war pledges to lead abstinent lives, reject pornography and fight abortion. They're further asked to perform "identificational repentance," lugging along family trees and genealogies to see where one of their ancestors may have enslaved or oppressed another so that they can make amends. (Many in the Joel's Army movement believe in generational curses that must be broken by the current generation).

As even his critics note, Engle is a sweet, humble and gentle man whose persona is difficult to reconcile with his belief in an end-time army of invincible young Christian warriors. Yet while Engle is careful to avoid deploying explicit Joel's Army rhetoric at high-profile events like The Call, when he's speaking in smaller hyper-charismatic circles to avowed Joel's Army followers, he can venture into bloodlust.

This March, at a "Passion for Jesus" conference in Kansas City sponsored by the International House of Prayer, or IHOP, a ministry for teenagers from the heavy metal, punk and goth scenes, Engle called on his audience for vengeance.

"I believe we're headed to an Elijah/Jezebel showdown on the Earth, not just in America but all over the globe, and the main warriors will be the prophets of Baal versus the prophets of God, and there will be no middle ground," said Engle. He was referring to the Baal of the Old Testament, a pagan idol whose followers were slaughtered under orders from the prophet Elijah.

"There's an Elijah generation that's going to be the forerunners for the coming of Jesus, a generation marked not by their niceness but by the intensity of their passion," Engle continued. "The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force. Such force demands an equal response, and Jesus is going to make war on everything that hinders love, with his eyes blazing fire."

Although Joel's Army theology is mainly directed at people in their teens and early 20s via events like The Call and ministries like IHOP, sometimes the target audience is even younger. In some of the most arresting images in Jesus Camp, a 2006 documentary about the Kids on Fire bible camp in North Dakota, grade school-aged kids dressed in army fatigues wield swords and conduct military field maneuvers. "A lot of people die for God and they're not afraid," one camper told ABC News reporters in a follow-up segment.

"We're kinda being trained to be warriors," added another, "only in a funner way."

Cain and the Intellectuals

Both Christian and secular critics assailed the makers of Jesus Camp for referring to the camp's extremist, militant Christianity as "evangelical." There is a name, however, that describes Kids on Fire's agenda, if you're familiar with their theology: Joel's Army. Pastor Becky Fischer, who runs the camp, said that a third of the kids at her camp were under 6 years old because they are "more in touch in the supernatural" and proclaimed them to be "soldiers for God's Army." Her camp's blend of end-times militancy and supernaturalism is perfectly emblematic of the Joel's Army movement, whose adherents believe their cause is prophesied in the Old Testament chapter titled "An Army of Locusts."

The stark, evocative passages of that chapter describe a locust swarm that lays waste to Israel (to this day, the region suffers periodic locust invasions): "Like dawn spreading across the mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come." As remarkable as the language is, most biblical scholars agree that it is a literal description of a locust invasion and resulting famine that occurred sometime between the 9th and 5th centuries B.C.E.

In the Book of Joel, the locust invasion is described as an omen that an Assyrian army to the north may attack Israel if it fails to repent as a nation. But nowhere is the invasion described as an army of God. According to an Assemblies of God position paper: "It is a complete misinterpretation of Scripture to find in Joel's army of locusts a militant, victorious force attacking society and a non-cooperating Church to prepare the earth for Christ's millennial reign."

The story of how an ancient insect invasion came to be a rallying flag for 21st-century dominonists begins just after World War II in Canada. Out of a small town in Saskatchewan, a Pentecostal preacher named William Branham spearheaded a 1948 revival in which he claimed that his followers lived in a new biblical time of "Latter Rain."

The most sinless and ardent of his flock would be called "Manifest Sons of God." By the next year, the movement was so strong -- and seemed so subversive to some -- that the Assemblies of God banned it as a heretic cult. But Branham remained a controversial figure with a loyal following; many of his followers believed him to be the end-times prophet Elijah.

Michael Barkun, a leading scholar of radical religion, notes that in 1958, Branham began teaching "Serpent Seed" doctrine, the belief that Satan had sex with Eve, resulting in Cain and his descendants. "Through Cain came all the smart, educated people down to the antediluvian flood -- the intellectuals, bible colleges," Branham wrote in the kind of anti-mainstream religion, anti-intellectual spirit that pervades the Joel's Army movement to this day. "They know all their creeds but know nothing about God."

The Gates of Hell

Branham was killed in a car accident in 1965, but his Manifest Sons of God movement, the direct predecessor of Joel's Army, lived on within a cluster of hyper-charismatic churches. In the 1980s, Branham's teachings took on new life at the Kansas City Fellowship (KCF), a group of popular self-styled apostles and prophets who used the Missouri church as a launching pad for national careers promoting outright Joel's Army theology.

Ernie Gruen, a local pastor who initially promoted and gave citywide credibility to KCF pastors in the early 1980s, cut his connections in 1990. Concerned about KCF's plans to push its teachings worldwide, Gruen published a 132-page insider's account, based on taped sermons and conversations and interviews with parents who had enrolled their kids in KCF's Dominion school.

According to Gruen's report, students at the school were taught that they were a "super-race" of the "elected seed" of all the best bloodlines of all generations -- foreknown, predestined, and hand-selected from billions of others to be part of the "end-time Omega generation."

Though he'd once promoted these doctrines himself, Gruen became convinced that the movement was turning into an end-times cult, marked by what he summarized as "spiritual threats, fears, and warnings of death," "warning followers to beware of other Christians" and exhibiting "a 'super-race' mentality toward the training of their children."

When contacted by the Intelligence Report, Gruen's spokesman said that Gruen stands by everything he published in the report but no longer grants media interviews.

The Kansas City Fellowship remains in operation and has served as a farm team for many of the all-stars of the Joel's Army movement. Those larger-than-life figures include John Wimber, the founder of a California megachurch, The Vineyard, who, before his death in 1997, proclaimed that Joel's Army would not only conquer the earth but defeat death itself. Lou Engle founded The Call based on the Joel's Army visions that KCF "prophet" Bob Jones (not to be confused with Bob Jones III of Bob Jones University) received while at KCF. Mike Bickle, another KCF member, stayed in Kansas City to form the International House of Prayer.

IHOP members and other Joel's Army adherents are well aware of how their movement is perceived by other conservative Christians.

"Today, you can type 'Joel's Army' into a search engine and a thousand heresy hunter websites pop up, decrying the very mention of it," writes John Crowder in The New Mystics. Crowder doesn't exactly allay critic's fears. "This is truly warfare," he writes. "This battle is not a game. They [Joel's Army warriors] will not be on the defense; they will be on the offense -- and the gates of hell will not be able to hold up against them."

So far, few members of the secular media have taken notice of Joel's Army, even as they report on Protestant dominionists like Pat Robertson or the more outrageous calls for the stoning of gays and lesbians emanating from Reconstructionist circles. There are exceptions, however. On the DailyKos, a well-read, politically liberal blog, a diarist has been blogging for two years about her experiences as a walkaway from a Joel's Army church. She writes under a pseudonym out of fear of physical reprisals.

She may have real cause for concern. As Wimber, the late founder of The Vineyard, put it in one of his most famous and fiery sermons, one that is still frequently cited by Joel's Army followers: "Those in this army will have His kind of power. ... Anyone who wants to harm them must die."

The Christian Right's Got a New Stealth Tactic to Smuggle Creationism into Science Class

By Sandhya Bathija

A new law in Louisiana allows teachers to bring in "supplemental textbooks" about evolution, the origins of life and global warming to science class.

In the 21 years Patsye Peebles taught biology in Louisiana public schools, she never received one complaint from parents for teaching evolution.

"The bottom line is that I never questioned their faith," she said.

Whenever she had a student who brought up creationism, she always made it clear that science is science, and religion is religion.

"I wanted them to understand," Peebles said, "that science has to be testable and proven with evidence."

Whether they agreed with evolution or not, Peebles wanted her students to become what she calls "biologically literate citizens." Now she worries that a new Louisiana law, which would encourage teachers to question evolution, will push the state's education backward.

"My whole curriculum was based on evolution, I integrated it into everything I taught," said Peebles, who testified against the law in a state Senate hearing and serves as a regional coordinator for the National Association of Biology Teachers.

"Now this muddies the waters and keeps students from having a really good education," she said. "When they go to college, they will be at a disadvantage because they will not have a good understanding of science."

Already, more than half of the state's eighth-graders lack basic competence in science, according to recent national test scores.

But despite pleas from scientists, civil liberties activists and educators like Peebles, Gov. Bobby Jindal signed Louisiana Senate Bill 733 into law. The new statute will allow teachers to introduce into the classroom "supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials" about evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.

The "Science Education Act," as it is known to the law's proponents, is the first such "academic freedom" bill to make it into the law books. The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design, is coordinating the promotion of similar bills throughout the country -- this year in states including Florida, Alabama, Missouri, Michigan and South Carolina.

"These bills are full of creationist code language," said Barbara Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. "The phrase 'academic freedom' has been used by creationists for decades."

Forrest is co-author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, a 2004 book that exposed the theocratic agenda of the Discovery Institute and other creationist organizations. She is leading the Louisiana Coalition for Science, a network of individuals and groups who organized opposition to SB 733.

Measures like Louisiana's new anti-evolution law are key pieces of the Religious Right agenda. Americans United for Separation of Church and State and its allies believe the Science Education Act is another attempt to force religion into public schools. AU has warned that lawsuits will result if Louisiana introduces religion into classrooms.

The major force behind the law in Louisiana is the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), a Religious Right organization that actively promotes creationism. The LFF, which is a state affiliate of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, suggested the measure to its sponsor, Sen. Ben Nevers (D-Bogalusa).

In the past, Nevers repeatedly tried to push through legislation promoting creationism. In 2001, he voted in favor of a measure declaring Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution to be the cause for racism.

Nevers also introduced a resolution encouraging schools not to purchase textbooks that "do not provide students with opportunities to learn that there are differing scientific views on certain controversial issues in science."

Though he insists the new law he sponsored is not intended to promote creationism in public schools, Nevers was caught telling the Hammond Daily Star otherwise.

"[The LFF] believe[s] that scientific data related to creationism should be discussed when dealing with Darwin's theory," Nevers told the newspaper. "This would allow the discussion of scientific facts. I feel the students should know there are weaknesses and strengths in both scientific arguments."

The law was carefully stage-managed. At the Senate and House committee hearings, the room was filled with Religious Right activists. Proponents included a group of home-schooled students, who will not even be affected by the law.

"They see all those people there and all they see are votes," said Forrest, who serves on the Americans United Board of Trustees. "The LFF has been lobbying the legislature for nine years laying this groundwork. They have been waiting for a number of factors to come together -- now the legislature as a whole is conservative and we have a governor who favors creationism."

Despite all the controversy surrounding this issue, Jindal barely publicized his signing of the new law. The press was not invited to witness the signing, and Jindal issued only a brief statement, in which he promised to "consistently support the ability of school boards and BESE [the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education] to make the best decisions to ensure a quality education for our children."

Perhaps Jindal's hush-hush behavior results from his indifference to the many educational, science and legal organizations that pleaded for a veto of the measure. Even Jindal's former college professor released a statement through the Louisiana Coalition for Science.

"Gov. Jindal was a good student in my class when he was thinking about becoming a doctor," said Prof. Arthur Landy of Brown University, "and I hope he doesn't do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana's doctors."

Nine of the nation's most prestigious scientific societies sent letters to the governor asking him to veto the bill.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society, said, "The bill disingenuously implies that particular theories, including evolution, are controversial among scientists. There is virtually no controversy about evolution among researchers, many of whom, like you, are deeply religious."

The American Institute of Biological Sciences wrote, "It is difficult to understand how Louisiana or the nation can recruit and educate the quality healthcare providers our citizens deserve if we are willing to sacrifice science education in our K-12 classrooms. If SB 733 is signed into law, Louisiana will undoubtedly be thrust into the national spotlight as a state that pursues politics over science and education."

The New York Times and a well-known columnist for the conservative National Review also expressed concerns about the measure. The National Review headline made it quite clear for the governor: "Governor Jindal, Veto This Bill!"

As more pressure was put on Jindal, supporters of the meaure re-emphasized their claim that only "science" will be introduced to students. But teachers in Louisiana claim the intent of the law has to be to teach creationism, otherwise it serves no purpose.

"Louisiana already has well-designed curriculum in place that allows for critical thinking," Peebles said. "There is no need for this."

The new creationist movement masks creationism in science terminology, but leads students to the same conclusion -- that life was created by a supernatural being, said Americans United Assistant Legal Director Richard Katskee.

Katskee served as one of the principal attorneys in the landmark Pennsylvania case in which a federal district court held that "intelligent design" attacks on evolution "distort and misrepresent scientific knowledge." (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District)

"The Kitzmiller court exposed intelligent design as what it is -- dressed-up creationism -- so the Discovery Institute had to go back to the drawing board," said Katskee.

Intelligent design, scholars insist, is merely the latest variant of creationism, concocted by the Discovery Institute and its allies. It was widely publicized this year by actor Ben Stein in his documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The LFF already has created a "textbook addendum" available on their Web site that teachers can use to introduce creationism to students.

To coincide with the textbook's chapter on fossils, the LFF's addendum states, "Flood waters do not produce fossils unless there is a sudden surge of water that is full of a lot of sediment. An example is when a dam breaks. When the billions of fossils that are everywhere are considered in this light, the earth's history had some very violent floods in its past."

Or to complement a chapter on life's origins, the LFF's "scientific" explanation states: "One of the smallest prokaryotes (H-39 strain of mycoplasma, a bacterium) consists of 640 proteins whose average length is 400 amino acid bondings.Under ideal conditions, the odds of this many amino acids coming together in the right order are approximately the same as winning the Power Ball Lotto every week for the next 640 years. How could this have happened accidently [sic]? The step from inanimate organic compounds to a living organism is beyond man's ability to create."

Critics say these types of publications will likely serve as the "supplemental materials" used to teach science under Louisiana's "academic freedom" measure.

"They may not be saying 'Noah's flood' or 'Adam and Eve' anymore, but it is the same creationist argument they are making," said Josh Rosenau, Public Information Project Director for the National Center for Science Education.

The Louisiana Coalition for Science fought hard to educate the state legislature on the dangers of this law and what it really means. Nine Coalition members, including teachers and scientists, testified at the Senate and House hearings to oppose the bill, but received no response or acknowledgment.

"The legislature knew full well what this bill meant, and they acted like they just planned for it to pass," Forrest said.

The reality of a new law that could result in costly litigation bills couldn't come at a worse time for a state with economic challenges. Prior to its passage, Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal, Science, and chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, referred to this measure as a "dangerous distraction."

"If the Louisiana bill becomes law, we are confident it would be overturned in court," Leshner wrote for the Shreveport Times. "But the fight would be an expensive, divisive distraction. At a time when Louisiana and the United States face serious economic challenges -- and incredible opportunities -- we must ensure the best possible science education for the next generation of problem-solvers."

For the past 40 years, federal courts have ruled against teaching creationism in public schools, according to Forrest. Of the 10 federal cases that ruled against creationism, two came out of Louisiana.

One of those cases was the U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down Louisiana's "Balanced Treatment for Creation Science and Evolution Science in Public School Instruction Act," a 1981 law similar in purpose to SB 733.

The law required evolution and creationism to be taught equally in science classrooms. When the statute reached the Supreme Court in 1987, it was held unconstitutional since the legislature's purpose "was clearly to advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created human mankind." (Edwards v. Aguillard)

It looks like Louisiana is repeating history, despite concerns from teachers, scientists and legal scholars.

"They just aren't even paying attention to what teachers are telling them," Peebles said. "We don't need this, we don't want it."

Yet Another Obscenity Trial? We Should Be Ashamed

By Dr. Marty Klein

Shocking but true: An American city, in the year 2008, asked a jury to declare that a movie of adults having sex is illegal.

Last week I traveled 14 hours to Staunton, Va., to testify in an obscenity trial. A guy was accused of selling DVDs in his shop that showed adults having sex with each other -- which, of course, he had.

Staunton is the kind of small town in which locals enjoy being helpful to strangers. In fact, when I pulled into a gas station needing directions, the mechanic fixing a flat asked me where I was from, shook my hand and introduced himself, welcoming me to the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.

But I couldn't have coffee with the guy. I was in Staunton to defend the Constitution from his neighbors. Maybe even from him.

I am desperate for you to understand this: An American city, in the year 2008, asked a jury of seven men and women to declare that a movie of adults having sex could be illegal. City prosecutor Ray Robertson said that some movies -- these movies, for sure -- could be so dangerous that they fall outside the protection of our glorious First Amendment.

What could these films contain that make them so treacherous? If the films called for organized revolution, they would be legal. If the films said blacks were lazy, Jews were cheap or Catholics were disloyal Pope-lovers, they would be legal. If the films said our two-party system was corrupt, and that censorship laws were destroying democracy, they would be legal.

The indicted films didn't say any of these things. But the government said these films were so dangerous that adults must be prevented from buying them.

In the United States. In 2008. Films that simply showed adults having sex: no kids, no animals. Not even a pretend rape. Just a few hours of boobs, boners and butts, waxed vulvas and a few pints of ejaculate (much of it on women's faces or chests). And hours of smiles.

To a casual observer, the bust looked simple enough: A small-town cop buys a DVD and gives it to the DA, who convenes a grand jury, which issues an indictment, and a small-time businessman gets hauled into court.

That would be bad enough. Remember, this is America.

But something more sinister was afoot: The federal Department of Justice was involved in this. Attorney Matthew Buzzelli, part of the DOJ's medieval Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, was serving as co-prosecutor, even though there were no federal indictments. Prosecuting a tiny shop in tiny Staunton is part of a bigger plan to attack smut across the country. "They're interested in how we do here," said local prosecutor Robertson.

Now let's roll in the irony.

Staunton, Va., is just a few miles from Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson -- author of the Declaration of Independence. And it's only a few miles from Montpelier, the home of James Madison -- who wrote the Constitution.

Staunton itself, in fact, is the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson, who guided the United States into and out of World War I. His presidential library is on North Coalter Street, two blocks from the courthouse. James Monroe's estate is less than an hour away. Founded more than three centuries ago, Staunton is thick with the perfume of history. The history of freedom.

The trial to decide whether one adult can sell a movie to another adult of other adults having sex was taking place in the shadow of Jefferson and Madison. If anyone noticed the depressing irony of this, they didn't mention it.

The government claimed the movies should be criminalized because:

• They depict sick behavior.
• They appeal to sick people.
• Watching movies like this makes people masturbate and makes them watch more movies, rape women and molest children.
• Criminalizing the movies is part of protecting American society from moral depravity.

The first three points are demonstrably not true. The government couldn't prove any of them, so they just asserted them, over and over.

The fourth claim is merely overheated rhetoric, a judgment about personal morality that any American is free to make. The idea that anyone could enforce that judgment on another American, however, is repulsive.

And yet that's what the government did -- it lied repeatedly about the first three claims and asserted the jury's responsibility to pursue the fourth.

In fact, the government used the slimiest tactic imaginable. Although every actress in "Sugar Britches" had proven she was over 18, the government said one looked much younger (small breasts, shaved bush, etc.). Therefore, according to the argument, the film appealed to pedophiles; it encouraged them to molest children and was thus so dangerous it had to be banned.

Judge Thomas Wood had already warned the prosecution not to make this a trial about child pornography. He became so angry at its repeated references to children that he threatened the government with a mistrial if they continued.

Without this inflammatory strategy, the government had nothing of substance to say. Its "expert," sexual trauma specialist Dr. Mary Anne Layden (who said porn is the "most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of today" and porn addicts have "more trouble recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts"), had no peer-reviewed studies and no nonclinical samples.

Similarly, federal attorney Buzzelli claimed the films were designed to appeal "to an unhealthy interest in sex."

Prosecutor Robertson argued that "You've never seen anything immoral in Staunton until this store came here," and "It was wrong for this community, obscene for this community." He urged the jury to exile the store and its products: "Go where they allow it ... where they don't care about the morality or the decency of their community. ... Don't turn Staunton into Las Vegas."

From small town to the mighty feds, that was the case: These films are immoral and so should be illegal.

To decide if the movies were dangerous, the jurors had to watch the movies. In broad daylight, fully clothed, sitting next to strangers, right after breakfast, they had to watch three hours of porn. Some of them had never watched porn in their lives and assumed, quite reasonably, that they would die some day without ever doing so.

Naturally, those men and women hated the experience the government put them through. Think about how you'd feel being forced to listen to hours of Bill O'Reilly, or whatever sounds to you like fingernails on a blackboard. Then multiply this by a thousand. That's what it must have been like for those jurors.

After that, they were supposed to imagine a normal person watching one of these films for a few minutes, getting excited and happily climaxing -- and then going back to a normal life, normal marriage, normal parenting.

Jury members were the only ones on Earth forced to watch the films. Then they were supposed to decide if their neighbors could be allowed to watch them voluntarily. How completely mixed up is that?

In the end, the clerk who sold the films to the cop was acquitted. The guy who owns the store was convicted of selling obscene material to a consenting adult. He will be punished. He has already spent tens of thousands of dollars defending himself. He has been dragged into court, branded a danger to his neighbors and their children, and threatened with spending month after terrifying month in jail.

The people on the jury will go home to their lives. They'll have a story to tell their friends. They'll have watched porn when they otherwise wouldn't have. Or they'll have watched familiar porn in a very unfamiliar situation.

But these seven people decided that there's a movie so dangerous that it challenges the entire basis of American democracy. It is so dangerous, it must be wiped out from the community. It must be kept away from adults, who are allowed to drive, to vote, to own guns, to raise children, to do surgery and to serve in the Army.

The movie is that dangerous, said the jury.

So people of Staunton, don't shake my hand, don't welcome me to your pretty little town, don't be so damn friendly. I hate what you did to my country last week. You spurned Jefferson, denied Madison, spit on the America you claim you love.

After the trial I walked down Market Street, back to the Stonewall Jackson Hotel. Bumper stickers exhorted me to Support Our Troops and Bring Democracy to Iraq.

I packed my things and drove to Monticello, as I'd planned. But I had trouble enjoying the tour of the place where Jefferson dreamt up America. My heart just wasn't in it.

'Free Speech Zones,' aka 'Freedom Cages,' at the Democratic National Convention

by Lindsay Beyerstein

The entire U.S. is supposed to be a free speech zone, isn't it?

My first assignment at the DNC was to find a designated "free speech zone" aka a "freedom cage." Apparently, there are several around the Pepsi Center. This one is near the corner of 7th St. and Auraria Pkwy, in sight of an amusement park.

The cage is just a parking lot in the baking sun, surrounded by a fine-gauge metal fence.

Street protests are forbidden outside these zones. Every effort has been made to isolate the areas from public view. DNC organizers made a big deal out of the fact that protesters would be allowed to use the parade route.

A "parade route" sounds public, maybe even prominent. In fact, the march takes place inside a semi-opaque corridor of cyclone fencing. Where the cyclone gauge is wide enough to see through, the fencers added green mesh to block out the light. On one side of the corridor is the University of Colorado, which is closed to the public today. On the other side is the security zone around the Pepsi Center.

I followed a Falun Gong marching band through the corridor in the mid-day sun. Between the altitude and the heat, nobody was feeling very well by the time we arrived at the cage.

Each group gets a slot on the marching schedule. Falun Gong had an 11 am start. At 3pm they'll do the same march all over again. If this morning's slightly surreal event is any indication, they will stand at attention with their banners and brass instruments facing two or three bored photographers. Paramedics on bikes will glide past periodically to make sure no one has keeled over with heat stroke.

FG had a full marching band in addition to the usual protesters with full-color banners depicting human rights abuses perpetrated against the group's followers by the Chinese government.

In this photograph, you see two Falun Gong protesters chatting to some of the more adventurous DNC-goers who ventured to the perimeter of their inner circle to check out the free speech. A security guard looks on.

The free speech zone was remarkably effective in deterring speech and media coverage of said speech. I saw a couple protesters from Recreate '68, a pharma-sponsored street team promoting flu vaccines, and some secularists with a Darwin fish sign.

Widespread Police Misconduct Reported at Santa Monica College

JUNE 6 UPDATE: Today, The Siege had a wonderful meeting with Dean Judith Penchansky (SMC Disciplinarian) and student Nehasi Lee in response to a false police report that described me as a “disruptive student” at the May 18 event detailed below.

The dean and I had a frank and honest exchange of ideas regarding my encounters with SMC’s police and her office’s duty to follow-up on any complaint lodged by any SMC staff against a student. She came across as reasonable, a good listener and ultimately acknowledged there was nothing for her office to take action over. Hopefully, as a responsible member of the SMC administration, she will relay to others in a position to care and take action, the concerns expressed about pervasive police misconduct at the college.

NEWS: Truly there are many officers of the law, everywhere, who operate day after day as heroes and defenders of the people, protecting our civil and constitutional rights and liberties. They deserve our continual thanks and appreciation for standing between us and the lawless chaos which would ensue without them. This author, on many occasions, has had reason to express appreciation for an officer’s help, especially those from the Los Angeles Police Department.

But there are others who, putting on a badge, believe themselves to be set apart to bully and abuse (click to witness SMC cops in action), at their pleasure, the very citizens they’ve sworn to protect. Usually this bullying happens to those who remain the most unempowered, either by economic class or by education. Students fit in here perfectly. It’s this small percentage of badge-wearers, committing crimes under the color of authority, who deserve our profound contempt and need to be held accountable under the law.

Some victims, unwilling to passively take the abuse, rise to the non-crime of “contempt of cop” and express their outrage at being brutalized. Such a response to victimization, most assuredly, arouses the ire and retaliatory passions of bad cops. Sadly, SMC has too many of these rogue officers (Malone, Champagne, Trump, Hearn, and Echeverria – just for starters) and SMC seems loathe about addressing the problem.

Curiously, bad cops - clueless to the law - respond as if “contempt of cop” is a crime. And using profanity towards such an officer who is abusive, invariably, results in a heavy-handed response from the offended officer(s), despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling 35 years ago in Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), regarding the defendant’s wearing a jacket proclaiming, “Fuck the Draft” that profanity is constitutionally protected speech.

Amongst numerous later rulings, in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Houston v. Hill, 482 U.S. 451 (1987) additionally held that:

“A municipal ordinance that makes it unlawful to interrupt a police officer in the performance of his duty is substantially overbroad and therefore invalid on its face under the First Amendment. The ordinance in question criminalizes a substantial amount of, and is susceptible of regular application to, constitutionally protected speech, and accords the police unconstitutional enforcement discretion, as is demonstrated by evidence indicating that, although the ordinance’s plain language is violated scores of times daily, only those individuals chosen by police in their unguided discretion are arrested.”

And later in their ruling:

“Although the preservation of liberty depends in part upon the maintenance of social order, the First Amendment requires that officers and municipalities respond with restraint in the face of verbal challenges to police action, since a certain amount of expressive disorder is inevitable in a society committed to individual freedom and must be protected if that freedom would survive.”

Such a lack of police restraint and abuse of student rights occurred at the campus newspaper office of the Corsair on Saturday, April 29, 2006.

At approximately 1:00 pm, in response to an invitation from Aaron Howell (then-online editor and ex-editor in chief from the fall semester), we met at his computer in the office of the campus newspaper, the Corsair. When long-time Corsair photographer Morgan Genser – who arriving minutes later and for reasons unknown, has taken an extreme disliking to me – saw that I was meeting with Howell, he called the SMCPD to have me ejected. At no time did Genser personally approach us to register his concerns.

At 1:10 pm, Officer Hearn arrived and demanded to know from me, “Are you supposed to be here?” When I looked to Howell to explain the situation, Hearn commanded, “You look at me when I’m talking to you.” When I suggested that he would get his answer if he would stop interrupting, Officer Malone arrived and escalated the situation to a new level of hostility. Malone demanded that we produce our identifications, although we are both known quite well by the SMCPD from friendlier encounters.

When Howell took exception to the uncalled-for hostility and disrespect from the officers, Malone declared, “You can speak when I tell you to.” Howell responded with “This is fucked.” Malone quickly walked around me and moved nose-to-nose with Howell and proceeded to verbally browbeat him. A few moments later, after I had been ordered out of the office (I immediately exited to just outside the open door.), Malone continued his verbal abuse of Howell.

When Howell’s exit from the room (which Malone had also ordered) was blocked by Malone, Howell responded to Malone’s rising verbal abuse and unreasonableness by calling him a “motherfucker.” Malone instantly lunged at Howell, threw him against the counter, and handcuffed him. I suggested to Howell to not resist and fully cooperate. Hearn ordered me to leave the building. I immediately complied. (These last five paragraphs are extracted from the formal citizen’s complaint, a remedy detailed in section 832.5 of California’s Penal Code, that I am lodging against the two officers.

If you suffer, or have suffered, abuse from any police officer, you should file a formal written complaint. Do not let the watch commander convince you to merely leave a verbal complaint. Those are easily ignored. The Penal Code requires the agency to launch a formal investigation when receiving a formal written complaint and the complaint usually stays in the offending officer’s career file, affecting future raises and job prospects, as well.)

According to Howell, he was immediately suspended pending a meeting with Judith Penchansky, campus disciplinarian. Now reinstated as a student, Howell is no longer the online editor at the Corsair. Barbara Baird, faculty advisor to the Corsair, expressed that it was appropriate for Genser to call the SMCPD to respond to my presence at the paper, ostensibly student-run. The prime offense, as she described it to me, was that a Corsair “policy,” prohibiting anyone not on the paper’s staff from being behind the counter, was violated. Apparently, Howell, despite the authority and respect he has earned for his service to the paper, had no discretion in the matter to allow anyone but Corsair staffers to meet with him in the office. Having been on the Corsair, myself, last spring when the editors acknowledged me as the “most valuable writer,” I know this policy has historically received selective enforcement, at best.

The Siege, by the way, would be delighted to testify on Howell’s behalf in any litigation he brings against Malone, Hearn, and the college for assault and batttery, false imprisonment, and violating his civil rights.

And a further aside: Not that The Siege recommends it – for a number of reasons – but to tell a cop, “Fuck you,” “Fuck off,” “You are a motherfucker,” or any other such colorful and lively verbiage, is protected speech and is not against the law. Wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with “Fuck SMC Police Misconduct” would be similarly protected. In fact, an officer acting against you for thus speaking is, himself, violating your constitutional rights, SMC’s ill-thought-out Student Code of Conduct, notwithstanding. Furthermore, it’s probable that much of SMC’s Code of Student Conduct is unnecessarily vague and ambiguous, and would not survive a legal challenge before a court of law. But most community college students are too unsophisticated and unempowered to fight such a fight, so the ill-constructed code remains in place – for now.

Suppression of Rights to Monitor Police

During a recent May 18 event, I tried to videotape an Associated Student sponsored performance of “the spoken word” in the public “free speech area” at the Clocktower for some positive coverage to put on The Siege, but SMC officers shut me down. When I redirected my videotaping towards them as I tried to discover the basis for their order, they became hostile and repeatedly threatened me. Professional and qualified officers would have known that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Smith vs. City of Cumming, et al., 212 F.3d 1332 [11CA 5/31/00], stated that:

“The First Amendment protects the right to gather information about what public officials do on public property, and specifically, a right to record matters of public interest.”

Since the May 18 police encounter, many students and professors (including Faculty Senate President, Richard Tahvildaran-Jesswein) have volunteered descriptions of their own, and other’s, run-ins and victimization at the hands of the wayward SMCPD. These cases are accumulating without even mounting a formal investigation.

The response of the SMCPD to the May 18 event has been to file a false and defamatory incident report against me with the intention of trying to get me suspended. Penchansky, who claims to have received a copy of the report on May 23 (Her office has a copy, but the SMCPD told me on May 25 it would “take up to 10 business days for them to give me a copy.” Both Penchansky and her assistant, Marilyn Goodrich, saw nothing peculiar in the disparity in access to the report.) is requiring a meeting with me to discuss claims by the police that I was “disruptive, argumentative, and rude.” The video at top, will help readers to determine for themselves the truth of these allegations. There is much more similar footage from that day’s encounters, with the behavior of all parties remaining consistent, and thus further damning for the officers.

It should be known that the publisher of The Siege has worked in a sector of the legal field for over 15 years. I engage officers-of-the-law on a regular basis in my work and over 95 percent of the time find myself expressing appreciation for a job well done. Sheriffs, police, ex-CHP commanders, attorneys, judges and others number amongst my friends. There’s a daily basketball game near downtown where one could play pick-up games with a lot of these folks. Many of these people are terrific defenders of the people. Contempt of cop is reserved for those whose performance under the color of authority is an abuse of that authority and suppresses the rights of people. The Siege has zero tolerance for such behavior.

If you have been a victim of SMC police misconduct and abuse, please write to The Siege at main@thesiegeonline.net. Various legal avenues of redress are being pursued to hold the SMCPD, the college’s administration – under whom the police directly operate – and the board of trustees accountable for the culture of fear and intimidation created by such a police force. Do not allow your victimization go unchallenged. Together we can bring to an end this blight on our community.

Stop the Execution: Jeff Wood Faces Death Tomorrow for a Murder He Didn't Commit

By Liliana Segura

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has unanimously denied clemency for Jeff Wood, a man who killed no one. This cannot be tolerated.

Imagine being 14 years old and waiting to learn whether your father is going to live or die. Only you're not in a hospital waiting room, or anticipating dreadful news from a war zone. You are in Texas, and your father is on death row. His life is in the hands of seven people who will sit around a table and, in a deliberate manner, officially decide whether he should, indeed, be strapped to a gurney and injected with lethal chemicals, as planned. On the narrow chance that they decide to grant clemency, it is then up to the governor, a man who has signed off on more executions than any other in the country, to follow through.

This is what Paige Lynn Wood went through all day yesterday, which also happened to be her father's 35th birthday. In the end, her worst fears were realized: On Tuesday afternoon, the board decided, in a vote of 7-0, to execute her father, Jeff Wood. Wood is scheduled to die by lethal injection Thursday night for a murder he did not commit. It's not just that he has a strong innocence claim, or that his state-appointed council was completely incompetent during his capital trial. The fact is, Wood did not kill anyone -- and no one argues that he did. The person who committed the murder for which he is scheduled to die was already executed, six years ago.

The Crime, an Overzealous Prosecutor and a Man Named "Dr. Death"

On New Years Day 1996, 22-year-old Jeff Wood was in on a plot to rob a Texaco convenience store in Kerrville, Texas, along with a man named Daniel Reneau. The store's assistant manager was an accomplice in the robbery: He was going to help Reneau navigate the store. But things didn't go according to plan, and in the early hours of Jan. 2, Reneau shot their friend Kriss Keeran, who was working behind the counter, in the face, killing him instantly.

Wood was startled when he heard the gunshot, but he reportedly helped carry out the subsequent robbery anyway, stealing several thousand dollars. He and Reneau were arrested within 24 hours. They confessed to the crime, and Wood led police to the murder weapon.

While it remains unclear to what extent Wood was supposed to participate in the robbery, what is absolutely undisputed is that Wood had no role in Keeran's murder. According to his attorneys, he was not even aware that Reneau was carrying a gun. After all, the robbery was supposed to be an inside job. As reiterated in the clemency brief filed by Wood’s defense attorneys early this month, "Reneau -- the only person inside the store and who carried a weapon -- alone made the decision to take Keeran's life. Mr. Wood was outside the store in his brother's truck."

Months later, during the trial of Daniel Reneau, there was no ambiguity over who had killed Keeran. According to Jordan Smith of the Austin Chronicle, "the state argued that he was responsible for Keeran's murder and portrayed Wood as little more than a sap, steamrolled by the villainous Reneau."

Renaeu was sentenced to death in March 1997. He was executed in 2002. Following the execution, the Dallas Morning News reported that when "asked on death row last week to identify the shooter, Reneau had a one-word reply: 'Me.'"

Having locked in a death sentence for Reneau, it should have defied logic and legal ethics for prosecutors to change the story to make Wood the real villain. But that's what happened. "At Wood's trial," reports Smith, "prosecutors reversed their strategy, arguing that Wood deserved to die because he'd gotten Reneau to 'do his dirty work.'"

Wood's defense lawyers were useless. "Bowing to Mr. Wood's emotional and irrational insistence, Mr. Wood's appointed lawyers declined to cross-examine any witnesses or present any evidence on Mr. Wood's behalf," his appeals attorneys argue. "Mr. Wood's trial attorneys called Mr. Wood's actions a 'gesture of suicide.'" If anything, it was an assisted suicide. Reports Smith, "not only did (Wood's defense) withhold from the jury evidence of his troubled youth, but they also failed to cross-examine any state witnesses, including the wildly speculative testimony of Dr. James Grigson -- derisively known by many, including colleagues in the psychiatric community, as 'Dr. Death' for predictably offering testimony in capital cases that a defendant would pose a danger to society, one of the questions a jury must decide in order to impose a death sentence." (In 1995, Grigson was kicked out of the American Psychiatric Association and Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians for "flagrant ethical violations.")

Thus, one year after Renaeu was given a death sentence for killing Keeran, Wood, despite not having been present to witness the murder, was given a death sentence for the same crime.

The Case of Kenneth Foster Jr.

The case of Jeff Wood may sound beyond the pale, even for the state that carries out more executions than any other jurisdiction in the country, but it is by no means the first time the state of Texas has tried to kill two people for a murder committed by one person. In fact, at this same time last year, Kenneth Foster Jr. faced execution in a case with striking similarities to Jeff Wood's. Foster was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of Michael LaHood Jr., despite the fact that the actual murder had been committed by another man.

Foster was 19 years old and acting as the "getaway driver" in a series of robberies when one of the people in the car, a man named Mauriceo Brown, shot and killed LaHood, the son of a prominent attorney, at the end of the night. Foster was 80 feet away -- like Wood, waiting in the car -- when Brown pulled the trigger. He had the windows rolled up and was unaware that a murder was taking place. Mauriceo Brown admitted to the murder; he was executed in 2006.

Last year, Foster's life was saved by a grassroots movement to stop his execution. At the center of the public outcry was the injustice of a legal statute, one that, in its application, is uniquely Texan.

An Unjust Law

Foster and Wood were both sentenced under Texas's "law of parties," which is a twist on a conspiracy statute that allows a defendant to be held accountable for a crime even if he or she did not commit it. As I explained in writing about the Foster case last summer, in the state of Texas, "this can mean sentencing someone to death even if he or she had no proven role in a murder."

Texas's law states that "if, in the attempt to carry out a conspiracy to commit one felony, another felony is committed by one of the conspirators, all conspirators are guilty of the felony actually committed, though having no intent to commit it." Defendants, the Texas courts say, can be held responsible for "failing to anticipate" that the "conspiracy -- in Foster's case, the robberies, for which he was the getaway driver -- would lead to a murder.

In Wood's case, the murder was also unplanned. Thus, he too is to be executed for "failing to anticipate" that someone would be killed.

Family Victims

As he faced execution, Foster shared something else in common with Wood: He had a young daughter who was a courageous voice of protest on behalf of her father. At a July 2007 rally, 11-year-old Nydesha Foster read from an essay about her father. "They hate on my dad because they say, 'he should have known better.' Are they following the law to the letter? Or the letter to the law?" She continued:

I stand as a child in the light of redemption. I benefit from his kisses and what he does even when people don't look or listen. So what is justice? Shame on you, Texas, because this time you're really wrong. This is my poem, my prayer, my song. That you will be known for something other than killing and ignoring the truth. We all make mistakes. Even you.

You can watch it here.

Like Nydesha, Paige Lynn Wood has stood in public to defend the life of her father. Pictures of her and other family members at rallies, making signs and approaching the governor's mansion can be found on the Save Jeff Wood Web site. So can her poetry.

One of her poems is called "Waiting."

I sit and wait … And wonder/I have been waiting my whole life

All the time wondering … Is my daddy coming home?

One is titled "Texas Took My Dad."

My dad is not the killer/That you are led to believe he is.

He is a kind and gentle soul who only tried to do/What he believed was best for me

... And for those of you/Who want to kill my dad …

For shame, for shame/It's you who are now to blame/for taking away my life!

Tell Gov. Rick Perry Not to Execute Jeff Wood

Jeff Wood's supporters are urging the governor of Texas to grant a 30-day stay of execution. Call or fax the governor today:

Phone: (512) 463-2000

Fax: (512) 463-1849

The Misshapen Mind: How the Brain's Haphazard Evolution Left Us with Self-Destructive Instincts

By Sasha Abramsky

Evolution didn't quite hit perfection when it comes to human thought processes.

The human mind, we like to think, is an embodiment of perfection. For those with a religious inclination, our ability to think through issues logically, to construct narratives about our surroundings, and to recall events that happened decades earlier is proof positive of a divine hand at work. For the nonreligious, the mind is a secular miracle, an indication that, left to its own devices, evolution produces something akin to a Panglossian vision of the best outcomes in the best of all possible worlds.

Two new books beg to differ. The first, New York University psychologist Gary Marcus' Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin, April 2008) sets out to show the many ways in which the human mind is an evolutionary hodge-podge, a series of good-enough solutions to the problem of understanding and responding to our environment. The second is The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't -- and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger (Dutton, June 2008), by the Canadian journalist Daniel Gardner.

I recommend you read them as a package. While both deal with complex psychological theories -- how memories can be triggered and manipulated and how our understanding of events is influenced by what other people think, by our existing preconceptions, and even by seemingly random factors such as the mentioning of a particular number before we're asked to provide the answer to a question -- Marcus clearly understands the psychological theories better. As a trained scientist, he's also somewhat more fluent in his explanations of why our brains are so easily influenced by irrational considerations.

A kluge, Marcus tells us, is an improvised engineering response to a problem. It is the product of a tinkerer playing around with odds and ends and creating a functional machine. That, he writes, is what the brain and its package of emotional, intellectual, and logical tools is. It is a series of good but imperfect methods for processing and acting on information, developed over hundreds of millions of years.

Evolution, in other words, produces things that work. That, Marcus argues, is the case with the brain, with how we store memories and how we respond to information. Were our memory systems better designed, they'd store and retrieve memories in the same way computers do. Instead, we rely on context to access snapshots from the past. Moving beyond memory, the logical aspect of higher thought is simply the icing on the cake, Marcus explains -- something that has evolved in an evolutionary microsecond and set up residence in the brain's frontal lobes. The older parts of the brain, call them our reptilian legacy, had much longer to mature. As a result, in many situations, especially when quick responses are demanded, they simply overwhelm our rational side, stampeding us into actions that don't really stand up to serious analysis.

Thus, we see an act of violence in the media (whether it be a single person being kidnapped and murdered, as with the 1993 celebrated Polly Klaas case in California, or mass slaughter, as with September 11), and we respond with a potpourri of inchoate fear, panic, and rage. We feel that the certainties governing our lives have been shattered. Rarely do we successfully step back and analyze the likelihood or unlikelihood of such an event impacting us.

For both Marcus and Gardner, the result is the emergence of an increasingly irrational political system, a sort of Truman Show in which reality is continually altered by an omnipresent media superstructure.

Marcus is particularly good at detailing the ways in which evolution didn't quite hit perfection when it comes to human thought processes. Whether it be in politics, in love, or in the imbibing of alcohol or narcotics, humans tend to look for short-term gratification even when, intellectually, they know their long-term interests might lie elsewhere. We're also easily influenced by what we see around us; we are willing to pay more for snacks, for example, immediately after being shown a picture of a happy face. We're more likely to cooperate with others shortly after hearing a news report about a do-gooder helping his neighbor.

Gardner, on the other hand, produces a powerful -- if overlong -- account of the social and political implications of our brains being kluges. If it's true that we're basically overdressed cavemen decked out with high-tech toys like laptops, airplanes, machine guns, and bombs, what does this mean?

Well, for Gardner it means that come crunch time, when we make decisions that matter, we often get it wrong: we let our guts override our heads. And so, in the aftermath of the catastrophic attacks of 9-11, millions of people temporarily stopped flying. The problem with this response is that car travel is far more dangerous than air travel. As a result, Gardner reports, 2002 saw a spike of 1,595 more auto deaths in the United States than would normally have occurred in a given 12-month period.

Post-September 11, Gardner writes, we sanctioned the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars on various fronts in the war on terrorism; at the same time, we largely ignored much more serious, though less media-accessible, public-health risks. Each year, 36,000 Americans die of the flu, 100,000-plus from obesity-related illnesses. Why weren't we panicked by these numbers in the ways we were by 9-11? Gardner argues that it's in large part because, for the media, it's far easier to cover, and sell, a human-made tragedy than an act of nature, and, increasingly, our responses are shaped by the information conveyed to us by the media.

Hence, we are willing to have our government spend hundreds of billions of dollars building up a security infrastructure to protect us from the threats of terrorism. But we get up in arms about financial waste when scientists ask for a fraction of that amount of money to map asteroids potentially lethal to humanity.

More generally, Gardner writes that we let ourselves be fooled by rumors -- such as the widely circulated but never accurately sourced claim that 50,000 pedophiles are surfing the Internet looking for victims at any given moment -- and we then create public policies based around these rumors. We read newspaper headlines about a school shooting, and we respond by locking down a generation, making children pass through metal detectors to go to class, refusing to let kids play outside unattended. As a result, we're raising a generation of children who don't exercise enough and spend too much time in front of televisions and computers.

And when it comes to numbers we do even worse. Gardner quotes an experiment in which some students are asked whether they would buy a piece of airport safety equipment that would save 150 lives and others are asked whether they would buy equipment that would save 98 percent of the 150 lives. Somehow, adding in the 98 percent increased support, even though fewer lives would actually be saved. Our brains, Gardner posits, have an inbuilt "wow factor"; we look for bold claims such as the one stressing the 98 percent success rate.

While both books are generally well written, each has one noticeable flaw. Marcus concludes his book with a sort of how-to guide to improve the working of the brain. It's clumsy and superficial, and the book would have benefited from its excision.

Gardner's flaw is more serious. The journalist's strength lies in pointing out, often with nice touches of humor, how policies and social needs are shaped and prioritized more via gut than logic. "One ad on my local radio station told listeners they should buy a home alarm because 'break-ins are on the rise!'" he writes in a section that deals with public fears around crime. He then gleefully adds: "Which the police told me was correct only if one defined the phrase 'on the rise' to mean 'declining.'"

Unfortunately, Gardner's humor is not matched by his ability to analyze the social implications of catastrophic events. So keen is he to detail the absurdities of an array of current social, economic, and military priorities that he underplays genuine and serious threats. In particular, the almost flippant way in which he dismisses the possibility of terrorist groups using weapons of mass destruction, and his inane confidence that should a nuclear attack be launched on a major city it would have only passing economic and social significance, significantly weakens his otherwise strong arguments.

Flaws aside, both books are worth reading. I'd read Marcus' book first for the scientific theories; then I would pick up Gardner's, skimming his explanations of the science and getting straight into the political and social implications of the culture of fear that our misfiring collective brain has created.

UCLA denies science credits for students transferring from christian schools

A battle is unfolding as UCLA denies science credits for students transferring in from christian school(s), saying the incoming students haven't been taught proper science and thus won't get credit. That the student's christian version of science education don't meet the science requirements for science credit. That the incoming student's christian school had been infusing much religious views and beliefs into their science curriculum, including the new students having no critical thinking skills and having been taught that intelligent design is a theory. The fight is playing out in court..

Victims of the Drug War Are Forced to Resort to Bizarre Legal Defenses

By Kevin Carey

How black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.

On November 16, 2005, Willie "Bo" Mitchell and three co-defendants -- Shelton "Little Rock" Harris, Shelly "Wayne" Martin, and Shawn Earl Gardner -- appeared for a hearing in the modern federal courthouse in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. The four African American men were facing federal charges of racketeering, weapons possession, drug dealing, and five counts of first-degree murder. For nearly two years the prosecutors had been methodically building their case, with the aim of putting the defendants to death. In Baltimore, which has a murder rate eight times higher than that of New York City, such cases are depressingly commonplace.

A few minutes after 10 a.m., United States District Court Judge Andre M. Davis took his seat and began his introductory remarks. Suddenly, the leader of the defendants, Willie Mitchell, a short, unremarkable looking twenty-eight-yearold with close-cropped hair, leapt from his chair, grabbed a microphone, and launched into a bizarre soliloquy.

"I am not a defendant," Mitchell declared. "I do not have attorneys." The court "lacks territorial jurisdiction over me," he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Judge Davis, a Baltimore-born African American in his late fifties, tried to interrupt. "I object," Mitchell repeated robotically. Shelly Martin and Shelton Harris followed Mitchell to the microphone, giving the same speech verbatim. Their attorneys tried to intervene, but when Harris's lawyer leaned over to speak to him, Harris shoved him away.

Judge Davis ordered the three defendants to be removed from the court, and turned to Gardner, who had, until then, remained quiet. But Gardner, too, intoned the same strange speech. "I am Shawn Earl Gardner, live man, flesh and blood," he proclaimed. Every time the judge referred to him as "the defendant" or "Mr. Gardner," Gardner automatically interrupted: "My name is Shawn Earl Gardner, sir." Davis tried to explain to Gardner that his behavior was putting his chances of acquittal or leniency at risk. "Don't throw your life away," Davis pleaded. But Gardner wouldn't stop. Judge Davis concluded the hearing, determined to find out what was going on.

As it turned out, he wasn't alone. In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call "the flesh-and-blood defense." The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government's side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a "flesh and blood man."

Judge Davis and his law clerk pored over the case files, which led them to a series of strange Web sites. The fleshand- blood defense, they discovered, came from a place far from Baltimore, from people as different from Willie Mitchell as people could possibly be. Its antecedents stretched back decades, involving religious zealots, gun nuts, tax protestors, and violent separatists driven by theories that had fueled delusions of Aryan supremacy and race war in gun-loaded compounds in the wilds of Montana and Idaho. Although Mitchell and his peers didn't know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves. It was the ideology that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the nation's history, and now, a decade later, it had somehow sprouted in the crime-ridden ghettos of Baltimore.

The series of events that led to the prosecution of Willie Mitchell et al are as convoluted, tragic and intermittently absurd as an episode of HBO's acclaimed Baltimore crime drama, The Wire. Mitchell and company came of age on the streets of West Baltimore, a few miles and a world away from the rejuvenated inner harbor and the tourist attractions near the federal courthouse. According to prosecutors, the group began selling drugs together as teenagers in the mid-1990s, driving up I-95 to New York City, buying half kilos of cocaine in upper Manhattan and cooking it into crack to sell back home. They added heroin to their repertoire a few years later, as well as robbing and killing other drug dealers. By 2002, they were firmly established in what passes as normal enterprise in a hollowed-out economy like Baltimore, where the drug trade often provides more opportunity than legitimate work and the bedrock institutions of family and school have crumbled. They had children out of wedlock with multiple women. They were occasionally arrested, although they never served much time. It was an insular culture where a ruthless prohibition against "snitching" to the police was often more powerful than any law. Even as cities like New York saw the murder rate decline dramatically, drug killings in Baltimore continued at a steady clip.

According to the indictment, the end began on February 18, 2002, in a downtown Baltimore nightclub called Hammerjacks, where Mitchell got into a dispute and stabbed a fellow drug dealer in the back, seriously wounding him. If Mitchell had hoped to get away with this attempted murder, he was swiftly and brutally set straight by the drug dealer's associates. When police on patrol found Mitchell later that evening, he was on a sidewalk with several men jumping on his head. Mitchell survived the assault, but he remained in serious trouble. The police had issued a warrant for his arrest; more ominously, his enemies had placed a $10,000 contract on his head.

Mitchell probably didn't know exactly what his enemies had in mind, but he was seasoned enough to realize that they wanted him killed. Ten days after the club incident, prosecutors allege, he made a phone call to an associate of the men who had beaten him up. The associate was a drug dealer named Oliver "Woody" McCaffity. Mitchell proposed that the two men meet that evening for a drug deal.

Neither man came to the meeting alone. Mitchell brought a friend, Shelton Harris. McCaffity brought his sometime girlfriend, Lisa Brown. Brown was a pastor's daughter, a computer systems analyst and mother of three. Her parents told reporters that she had broken up with McCaffity after learning of his involvement with drugs. But when he called and invited her to the movies, she decided to go along.

The two parties drove to the Park Heights section of Northwest Baltimore. It was a quick meeting. Mitchell and Harris climbed into the backseat of McCaffity's Infiniti Q-45. Then they shot McCaffity through the head and fired through Brown's raised right hand into her left temple, where police later found a .357 caliber bullet. The bodies of McCaffity and Brown were left in the car, which rolled downhill and rammed into a nearby tree at the dead-end of the street. Police found it two hours later. A palm print on the car window was later matched to Harris, and McCaffity's cell phone records revealed calls that night to Mitchell's phone. Mitchell, suspecting that McCaffity's associates were going to try to kill him, had apparently decided to kill first. The murder would probably not have attracted much attention, except for the fact that McCaffity's Infiniti was owned by Hasim Rahman, the recently dethroned heavyweight boxing champion of the world. McCaffity was a friend and business associate of Rahman, causing the ex-champ to quickly call a press conference denying any involvement in the crimes. (Police have never alleged otherwise.)

If the killing of McCaffity and Brown had been a successful preemptive strike, Mitchell was also prepared to kill for more mundane reasons. On March 24, a few weeks after the Mc- Caffity murder, Mitchell allegedly called a former high school classmate named Darryl Wyche and offered to buy some heroin and cocaine from him. Darryl, excited by the prospect of a big sale, agreed. The two made plans to meet in a nearby industrial park around midnight.

Again, neither party came alone. Wyche brought his younger brother Tony, who had reluctantly agreed to drive. Mitchell brought Harris again, as well as two more friends: Shelly Martin and Shawn Gardner.

The Wyche brothers opened the back door of their Honda to let Mitchell and his men into the back seat. Then each received a bullet in the side of the head. The next morning the police found the bodies, seat belts still on. (Mitchell appears to have seen Wyche as an easy source of drugs and cash.)

But Mitchell's luck was about to end. When Baltimore homicide detectives found the bodies of the Wyche brothers, they assumed they had come across another hard-to-solve drug killing. Then they received an unexpected phone call. It was from Darryl Wyche's mother-in-law, who reported finding a strange message on her phone. Recorded at 12:43 a.m., the message was four and a half minutes of a group of men with names like "Wayne" and "Shorty" saying things like "Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup, yo, they both fucked." The call had come from the cellphone of Darryl Wyche.

Wyche's family and the police soon figured out what had happened: One of the murderers had stolen Darryl Wyche's phone and forgotten to turn it off. While the killers were driving away, one of them had accidentally pressed the phone's speed dial button, calling Darryl's mother-in-law and producing a most unusual piece of evidence: a voicemail confession. With considerable understatement, a lieutenant in the city homicide unit reflected on his good fortune to the Baltimore Sun. "We got lucky," he said. Willie Mitchell and Shelly Martin were soon rounded up and put in jail.

What would become the fifth and final murder charge in the case of Willie Mitchell and his cohorts took place two months later. This time, only Mitchell's friend Shawn Gardner was directly involved. It began with a man named Darius Spence, who had found out that his wife, Tanya, was cheating on him with a local drug dealer everyone called "Momma."

Spence decided to have Momma beaten up severely. To accomplish this, he negotiated with another drug dealer named Willie Montgomery. Would Montgomery be willing to beat up Momma in exchange for money? But Montgomery had another proposition altogether. Beating Momma up didn't make sense, Montgomery argued, because then Momma would undoubtedly try to kill Montgomery. It was better just to kill Momma outright, and for five thousand dollars, Montgomery would be glad to do the job. Spence said he'd think it over.

Unfortunately for Darius Spence, Montgomery wasn't interested in waiting around for an answer. Instead, sensing opportunity, Montgomery decided to tell Momma about the hit. If I turn down the deal, Montgomery explained, then Spence will probably just hire someone else to kill you. Therefore, Montgomery reasoned, you should hire me to kill Spence first. Momma was persuaded. (As Montgomery later explained to the prosecutors, "I guess he like that idea better than Darius Spence's idea.")

To execute the hit on Spence, Montgomery recruited two associates, one of whom was Shawn Gardner. For the next two months, the three men staked out Spence's apartment. The plan was for Shawn Gardner and his associate to invade from the basement and carry out the killing, and then run to a nearby getaway car, which was to be driven by Montgomery. Special care was to be taken not to harm Tanya, and they would cover her eyes with duct tape to prevent her from identifying them. Still, Montgomery warned Momma that he couldn't guarantee Tanya's safety. "If it's up to me, she won't be hurt," Montgomery told Momma, "but some things could go wrong." Momma's reply was to the point: "Do what you do."

On June 7, 2002, the three men drove to the Spence apartment, a worn red brick building at the end of a cul-de-sac a few miles from Baltimore city. But the hit didn't go as planned. Darius Spence wasn't in the apartment, and they didn't manage to blindfold Tanya. As children played outside the Spence apartment, Tanya burst through the kitchen door on the third floor, screaming, "No! No!" Lifting one leg over the balcony, she tried to climb down to the floor below but lost her grip and fell fifteen feet to the ground, landing a few feet from the children. Gasping for breath, she motioned for them to run away before crawling under the first floor balcony. Moments later, the two killers emerged from the Spence apartment, ran down the steps and stopped a few feet from Tanya, now lying in the fetal position in the dirt and begging for her life. One pulled out a large caliber revolver and fired two shots into Tanya's chest as the children watched. Then both men ran away.

Unfortunately for the killers, Montgomery wasn't where they thought he'd be. Somehow the meeting place had gotten confused, and the getaway failed. Police quickly apprehended Shawn Gardner and his associate. Eventually, the law caught up to Montgomery, too.

Gardner was tried, convicted, and sentenced in state court to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder of Tanya Spence. Meanwhile, Willie Mitchell and Shelly Martin were charged by the state with the Wyche brothers' killings and sat in prison for the next year and a half as police and prosecutors assembled their case.

Then, on January 22, 2004 -- nearly two years after the first four murders -- the word came down from the office of U.S. Attorney Thomas DiBiagio: the Willie Mitchell case was going federal, and the government was seeking the death penalty. The Justice Department, DiBiagio explained, was going after "individuals responsible for making life hell in Baltimore."

For Mitchell and company, this was bad news. Instead of jurors selected from the city pool, Mitchell would likely be judged by an all-white panel of citizens from places like Maryland's westernmost rural counties or the far reaches of the Eastern Shore. He would face better-funded prosecutors, and was far more likely to get the death penalty. Maryland has only executed five people in the last thirty years, but in 2005, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was aggressively seeking death sentences. In fact, the Justice Department was even retrying cases in order to win death penalties for crimes like the Spence murder, for which Shawn Gardner was already serving life without parole.

DiBiagio's office also added a raft of conspiracy charges to the indictment, filed under the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. By alleging that the defendants were part of an organized conspiracy -- the so-called "Willie Mitchell organization" -- prosecutors could hold all four defendants responsible for any of the crimes the others had committed. That's why Shelton Harris, who wasn't originally arrested for the Wyche or the McCaffity and Brown murders, was pulled off the street and charged with the full slate of crimes. It's also why Mitchell and Harris were charged with the Spence murder, although they were already in jail when Shawn Gardner committed it. RICO is normally applied to members of the mafia and organized crime, and its use sent a clear message: the government was coming at Mitchell and company with everything it had.

The prosecutors bolstered the conspiracy argument by noting that, unlike most Baltimore drug dealers, Mitchell and company had incorporated a legal entity for which they all worked and allegedly funneled proceeds of their drug business into: "Shake Down Entertainment, Ltd." The group promoted rap CDs and concerts through the company, which even had its own record label, "Shystyville." Soon, Shystyville CDs with titles like "Pure Shit" became evidence of not just the conspiracy but the crimes themselves, with prosecutors entering into the record lyrics like these:

I watch ya brains fly all over on the bitch next to you
Homeboy it's up to you I could put this pup to you
Then to pumpin' you up like a innertube
Send shots that'll pump up the end of you
Leave you all fat and bloated you know I keep
the Mac loaded then I like ta clack rollin'
That's why Bo and Weez on lock now and every day on lock down
Niggas getting shot down for runnin' they mouth clown
Tell me how it feels with a gun in ya mouth now

Prosecutors alleged that the "bitch next to you" was Lisa Brown, who was sitting beside Oliver McCaffity when he was shot through the head, that a "pup" is slang for the largecaliber revolver used in the killing, that the "Bo" on "lock now" was the imprisoned Willie "Bo" Mitchell, and that the reference to "Niggas getting shot for runnin' they mouth" amounted to witness intimidation. Faced with the prospect of an all-white jury hearing this music in the courtroom, the defense lawyers objected on the grounds that lots of songs have lyrics that "proudly refer to violent retaliation," offering by way of example country star Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)."

Nearly two years passed. The wheels of justice were turning, slowly but surely. Then came the memorable hearing in which the defendants debuted the flesh-and-blood defense. After that, everything changed.

month after the hearing, Judge Davis took the unusual step of issuing a written opinion denying all of the defendant's "unusual -- if not bizarre" arguments. "Perhaps they would even be humorous," Davis wrote, "were the stakes not so high It is truly ironic that four African- American defendants here apparently rely on an ideology derived from a famously discredited notion: the illegitimacy of the Fourteenth Amendment." One can understand his incredulity that four Baltimore drug dealers might invoke a racist argument that dates back to the nineteenth century. But as it turns out, that's when the seeds of the flesh-and-blood defense were sown.

In 1878, southern Democrats pushed legislation through Congress limiting the ability of the federal government to marshal troops on U.S. soil. Known as Posse Comitatus, (Latin for "power of the county") the law's authors hoped to constrain the government's ability to protect black southerners from violence and discrimination. The act symbolically marked the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow.

For the next eight decades, black Americans lived under the yoke of institutional racism. But by the late 1950s, the civil rights movement was growing in strength. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent 1,200 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, so that nine black students could safely enter a previously all-white high school. The landmark Civil Rights Act followed in 1964.

These developments horrified one William Gale, a World War II veteran, insurance salesman, self-styled minister of racist Christian Identity theology, and raving anti-Semite. In 1971, he launched a movement whose impact would reverberate through the radical fringes of American society for decades to come. He called it Posse Comitatus, named for the 1878 law he believed Eisenhower had violated by sending the troops to Little Rock. In a series of tapes and self-published pamphlets, Gale explained that county sheriffs were the supreme legal law enforcement officers in the land, and that county residents had the right to form a posse to enforce the Constitution -- however they, as "sovereign citizens," chose to interpret it. Public officials who interfered, instructed Gale, should be "hung by the neck" at high noon.

Gale's racist beliefs were hardly unique. His singular innovation was to devise a "legal" philosophy that was enormously appealing to disaffected, alienated citizens. It was a promise of power, a means of asserting that they were the true inheritors of the founding fathers' ideal, a dream they believed had been corrupted by a vast conspiracy that only they could see. Gale's ideas gave people on the paranoid edge of society a collective identity. It told them what they desperately wanted to hear: that the federal government was illegitimate, and that the legal weapons the state used to oppress them could be turned against the state.

Soon, Posses were sprouting across the country, attracting veterans of the 1960s-era tax protest movement, Second Amendment absolutists, Christian Identity adherents, and ardent anti-communists who had abandoned the John Birch Society because they felt the organization wasn't extreme enough. Local groups would meet to share literature, listen to tapes of Gale's sermons, and discuss preparations for the approaching End Times. This extremist stew produced exotic amalgamations of paranoia, such as when Posse members would explain the need for local militias to stockpile weapons in order to defend white Christians from blacks in the coming race war sparked by the inevitable economic collapse caused by the income tax and a cabal of international Jewish bankers bent on global dominance through one world government, for Satan.

While local Posses would periodically confront law enforcement officials in the 1970s, (usually in property disputes), they were often incompetent, and few people were hurt. But things took a serious turn in 1978, when thousands of farmers rallied in Washington D.C. seeking relief from low commodity prices, high interest rates, and farm debt. When Congressional relief attempts failed, some farmers became susceptible to peddlers of the Posse ideology, which preached that the farm crisis had been brought on by the international Jewish banking conspiracy, abandonment of the gold standard and a malevolent Federal Reserve.

By 1982, Bill Gale had flown to Kansas to conduct paramilitary training and indoctrination for splinter groups of disaffected farmers. At night, a country music station in Dodge City broadcast tapes of Gale's sermons. "You're either going to get back to the Constitution of the United States in your government," he intoned, "or officials are gonna hang by the neck until they're dead Arise and fight! If a Jew comes near you, run a sword through him." As Posse ideology rippled across the distressed farm belt, violence followed. Several deadly confrontations between Posse adherents and law enforcement made national headlines; Geraldo Rivera descended on Nebraska to document the "Seeds of Hate" in America's heartland. By 1987, Gale's rhetoric had escalated further. He told his followers that "You've got an enemy government running around its source and its location is Washington, D.C., and the federal buildings they've built with your tax money all over the cities in this land."

Hucksters and charlatans prowled the Midwest as the farm crisis deepened, selling desperate farmers expensive seminars and prepackaged legal defenses "guaranteed" to cancel debts and forestall foreclosure. Since the gold standard had been abandoned in 1933, they argued, money had no inherent value, and so neither did their debts. All they had to do, farmers were told, was opt out of the system by sending a letter to the appropriate authorities renouncing their driver's license, birth certificate, and social security number. That number was allegedly tied to a secret government account held in a secure subterranean facility in lower Manhattan, where citizens are used as collateral against international debts issued by the Fed and everyone's name is on a master list, spelled in capital letters -- the very same capital letters used in the official court documents detailing foreclosure and other actions against them. The capital letter name was nothing but an artificial construct, they were told, a legal "straw man." It wasn't them -- natural, live, flesh and blood men.

Bill Gale died on April 28, 1988, three months after being sentenced in federal court for conspiracy, tax crimes, and mailing death threats to the Internal Revenue Service. By that time, the farm crisis had begun to recede. Posse ideology simmered for the next few years, morphing into the "Christian Patriot" movement, which sanded down some of the roughest racist and anti-Semitic edges while retaining the core beliefs of Constitutional fundamentalism. The patriots saw themselves as "sovereign citizens," unlike the "federal citizens" who had been created by the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The deadly confrontations between federal agents and extremists at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco, Texas in 1993 brought latent anger with the federal government back to a boil. The militia movement of the 1990s built on Posse tenets of county- based, self-organized paramilitary groups led by citizens expressing their basic Constitutional rights. Most groups stuck with conducting survivalist training camps and filing bogus liens against houses owned by local judges. But a few did much more.

In 1993, a Michigan farmer and survivalist named James Nichols was pulled over for speeding. Instead of simply paying the fine, he argued in court that his "sovereign citizen" status made him immune to prosecution. That same year, James' brother Terry tried to pay off a $17,000 debt with a fake check issued by a radical "family farm preservation" group run by Posse adherents. Two years later, Terry Nichols helped to bring the Posse's anti-government hatred to its ultimate fruition. On April 18, 1995, he and a friend named Timothy McVeigh loaded 108 fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer into a Ryder truck. The next day, McVeigh bombed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people on the second anniversary of Waco.

After the attack, the Feds began cracking down on white supremacist groups, including one called the "Montana Freemen," who were, in the words of hate-group expert Daniel Levitas, "the direct ideological descendants of the Posse Comitatus." (Levitas' book, The Terrorist Next Door, contains the definitive account of Bill Gale and the Posse.) The Freemen were arrested in their isolated compound after a threemonth standoff with the FBI. At trial, they filed an array of bizarre documents citing the Fed, the gold standard, the 14th Amendment, and the Uniform Commercial Code, but to no avail. They were sent to the maximum security "Supermax" federal prison in Florence, Colorado, where they remain today.

But the appeal of their anti-government dogma didn't disappear. The Freemen continued to attract sympathizers outside Supermax walls. Some collected the documents the Freemen filed during their trial and began offering them for sale via adver tisements in "America's Bulletin," a newsletter espousing Posse- style anti-government theories that is widely distributed throughout the prison system by white supremacists.

In October 2004, a prisoner named Michael Burpee arrived at the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center in downtown Baltimore. Burpee had recently been convicted in Florida of trafficking PCP to Maryland. Hoping for leniency, he pled guilty, only to receive a twenty seven-year prison sentence dictated by harsh federal sentencing guidelines. Desperate for a way out, he began listening to someone -- presumably a fellow prisoner -- who explained how the charges were all part of a secret government conspiracy against him. Then Burpee was brought up on new federal drug charges in Maryland, and shipped north. He carried with him a pile of documents that were remarkably similar to those that had been filed by the Montana Freemen.

In Baltimore, Burpee found a group of inmates at the margins of society, people like Willie Mitchell and company who were staring at the full force of the federal government. As one defense attorney representing a flesh-and-blood defendant put it, they "saw a freight train coming and felt three feet tall." Soon the unorthodox legal filings and courtroom outbursts began to multiply. It was, one public defender later explained, "like an infection that was invading our client population of pre-trial detainees." Burpee appears to have been patient zero in the epidemic. For over a year, he harangued his lawyers and judge about the conspiracy and spread the word in the Baltimore lockup. Then, in a stroke of bad luck for the public defender's office, the U.S. Attorney's office decided to drop the charges against Burpee -- perhaps reasoning that he wasn't worth the hassle considering that he had already been sentenced to twenty-seven years. For Burpee's peers, the decision imbued the flesh-and-blood defense with legitimacy and the hope of freedom.

Before long, the relatives of the defendants were scanning Web sites like www.redemptionservice.com, which offers maps showing how Satanic runes were secretly incorporated into the street plan of Washington, D.C., and a deluxe package of instructions for renouncing one's social security number for only $3,900, payable by check or money order.

Like the Midwestern farmers before them, the Baltimore inmates were susceptible to the notion that the federal government was engaged in a massive, historic plot to deprive them of life, liberty, and property. Such suspicions are prevalent in certain pockets of the black community -- that year, a study from the Rand Corporation found that over 25 percent of African Americans surveyed believed the AIDS virus was developed by the government, and 12 percent thought it was released into the population by the CIA. And black separatist groups like the Nation of Islam -- also fond of conspiracy theories -- have long cultivated members through the prison system; some of these groups have explicitly adopted the language of constitutional fundamentalists. Given these developments, Levitas told me, "I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner."

This, then, was how Willie Mitchell came to draw on the accumulated layers of three decades of right-wing paranoia and demand that his case be dismissed "in accord with House Joint Resolution 192, and Public Law 73-10" -- laws that involved the abandonment of the gold standard and the Federal Reserve. And it explained why Shawn Gardner kept insisting that he be addressed as "Shawn-Earl: Gardner," rather than the capital-letter SHAWN GARDNER printed on the indictment: he thought that if he could convince the court to call him by his "natural" name, it would be tantamount to admitting that the charges had been filed against someone else.

On the morning of January 10, 2006, two months after the first flesh-and-blood hearing, Gardner returned to Judge Davis's courtroom. Moments after Davis arrived, Gardner stood up. "I object," he said, over and over, until Judge Davis had finally had enough. "Do you know what you're doing?" he asked Gardner. "You are committing suicide in broad daylight. There are public suicides in this country far too often. People jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge. People walk into their workplaces with a gun and put the gun up to their head and pull the trigger. People slash their wrists. I don't want you to join that community, but that's what you're doing, sir."

Gardner tried to argue that the court had no power over him under "common law." "At common law," Judge Davis replied, "you were property. You were bought and sold just like those Timberlands on your feet today can be bought and sold. That's what your ancestors were, some of them, and that is what my ancestors were, some of them."

"You have invoked ideas formulated and advanced by people who think less of you than they think of dirt," Davis continued. "The extremists who have concocted these ideas that you are now advancing in this courtroom are laughing their heads off. You are giving them everything they ever wished for. They should be paying you to do what you are doing. They are going to make you the poster child for their movement. When you complete this suicide, they will honor you because you are doing their work, better and more effectively than any of them ever dreamed they could do. Some of them -- " "I object," said Gardner, interrupting. "The government wants to do the same thing anyway. So what's the difference?"

Gardner, unrepentant, was escorted from the courtroom. And so the tenets of Posse Comitatus continued their long, strange journey, from the racist, hate-filled mind of William Gale to four black defendants on trial for their life in Baltimore federal court.

A little more than a year after the November 2005 hearing, the flesh-and-blood phenomenon took another twist. A key part of the conspiracy indictment against Mitchell et al was the allegation that the defendants acted together in pursuit of criminal goals. The seemingly choreographed speeches and the identical filings, all submitted on the same day and mailed by the same person, suggested that the four defendants were going to great lengths to coordinate their actions, despite being housed in separate prison facilities and having no obvious means of communication. Ergo, evidence that the conspiracy was continuing in jail. The U.S. Attorney's office also added new charges of felony obstruction of justice, citing the disruptive nature of the fleshand- blood defense. The prosecutors weren't just rejecting the defense as an argument for innocence. They were saying that it was, itself, a crime.

Undaunted, Mitchell and company continued making courtroom speeches and filing more nonsensical motions. One, for instance, claimed that Judge Davis' court only had jurisdiction over crimes committed in federally owned "forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and enclaves."

None of these arguments had a prayer of overturning the charges. But they had an impact nonetheless. They made a long, complex trial longer and more complex still. Seeking the death penalty is rightfully arduous -- it requires legal justifications for the penalty itself, enhanced scrutiny over jury selection, an additional penalty phase after a conviction, and so on. Conspiracy charges create further legal burdens. And the way Mitchell et al chose to deal with their attorneys -- not dismissing them outright, but asking them to sign a peculiar "contract" that would essentially prohibit them from mounting a defense -- created more problems. If the defendants weren't dealt with carefully, they might be able to appeal by claiming that they had been inadequately represented. The last thing Judge Davis wanted was for an appellate court to throw out a verdict and send the case back to Baltimore to start all over again. According to a source close to the court, dealing with the flesh and blood defense has been "one of the greatest challenges Davis has faced in twenty years as a judge, by far."

By mid-2007, the federal prosecutors were starting to run low on a vital resource: time. As years go by, memories fade, police officers retire or transfer, informants change their mind, and juries wonder, why, if the case is so straightforward, it took so long to make. On September 6, 2007, prosecutors withdrew the death penalty for all four defendants.

Nobody in the Baltimore federal courthouse is willing to state, or even speculate on the record, that Mitchell and his cohorts may have averted death with the flesh-and-blood defense. There are other possibilities involving evidence, witnesses, and Justice Department policy. But the elaborate processes of federal capital cases weren't built to accommodate farcical pro se filings and challenges. Traffic offenses, tax cases -- even farm foreclosures -- are one thing. When the end goal is execution, even the most ludicrous defenses are taken seriously.

On January 8, 2008, the case of United States of America v. Willie Mitchell et al convened once again in the main courtroom of the federal courthouse. The lawyers arrived first, chatting in the manner of people who had spent nearly four years and counting on the odyssey of this case. The defendants came next. While Shawn Gardner wore the blue work shirt of a lifer in state prison, Willie Mitchell sported comfortable baggy jeans and a stylish black shirt. Mitchell sauntered to his table, and spied the lone spectator in the courtroom's auditorium-style gallery of one hundred- plus seats, a slender black woman who looked to be in her late twenties. His eyes lit up as he smiled and mouthed "How are you?" "I'm good, I'm good" she murmured. "Your new lawyer -- get his card!"

Judge Davis arrived last, emerging from a wooden door behind the bench, beneath oil portraits of judges from days gone by. The hearing will be short, he said; the purpose is to establish a schedule for future motions, and ultimately the trial. Davis and the lawyers spent the next twenty minutes trying find eight weeks of available courtroom time for ten busy lawyers plus the judge. Then, apropos of nothing, Shelton Harris stood up. "Good morning your honor," he began. Davis saw where this was going and cut him off. "I haven't recognized you yet, Mr. Harris. You'll have time to talk later," he said. "I accept your offer," Harris replied softly, and sat down.

The scheduling discussion continued; Mitchell rested his head in his arms as though bored. Finally, Judge Davis allowed Harris to speak. Harris launched into the now familiar oration -- "I request you, the judge, close the accounts" He spoke rapidly in a low, gravelly voice, as if he'd worked hard to memorize the speech and didn't want to leave anything out.

Harris finished, sat, and Judge Davis turned to the defendants. The speech you just gave has no legal meaning whatsoever, he said sternly. They were words in the English language, but they have no meaning as a matter of law. If, in future proceedings, you persist -- even politely -- in making these speeches, you face a severe risk of being expelled from the courtroom. The court also may conclude that you are waiving your right to appointed counsel, in which case you would have to represent yourself. That would be a sad day. "We are in recess," Davis said. He turned back toward the door to leave.

Then several things happened at once. Shawn Gardner, handcuffed, slumped in the arms of the federal marshals, who seized him beneath his armpits and dragged him across the courtroom toward the door. Willie Mitchell raised his right hand to speak, intent on giving his version of Harris' speech, but the marshals grabbed his arm and forced it down behind his back toward his left wrist, which was already cuffed. Mitchell struggled and yelled at his lawyer, "They got my arm in a chicken wing!" The marshals forcibly moved Martin and Harris toward the door. Judge Davis watched with consternation as they were dragged from his court.

Willie Mitchell and company won't go on trial until September, if then, and they won't face the death penalty, even though they probably deserve it if anyone does. But they will probably be convicted and spend the rest of their lives in federal prison, never to be heard from again, because in the end, the flesh-and-blood defense is no defense at all. The 14th Amendment didn't revoke Shawn Gardner's natural citizenship -- it gave him protection under the law, and paved the way for another black man to judge his case. There's no international cabal of Jewish bankers conspiring against him -- one of his lawyers, a professor at Howard University Law School, is Jewish. The secret histories and grand conspiracies that have fueled decades of right-wing paranoia, morphing to accommodate one doomed cause after another until finding an unlikely temporary home in a Baltimore lockup, are lies and nothing more.

As the marshals shoved the four men toward the courtroom door, back to the prison they'll never leave, they shook their heads and looked at each other smiling, as if to say right, right, isn't it always just like this? One of them let out a chuckle that rose above the din. Judge Davis turned to the court reporter. "Let the record show," he said, "that Mr. Harris is laughing."