Excerpt from a Sierra Times report written by their correspondent, who was
present at Bell's sentencing last Friday:
http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/aug/26/arex082601.htm
After a flurry of motions to dismiss the case for reasons varying from
judicial prejudice to fraud by the court were denied, Bell's attorney
Robert Leen addressed the pre-sentencing report. A normal practice in
federal trials and many state criminal trials, the pre-sentencing
report recommends a sentence depending on a number of factors. A
defendant is assigned a "level" based on the crime and this level is
adjusted upward if other factors are present. Leen argued that the
factors that were applied were inappropriate or not present.
Two of the factors might be of specific interest to Sierra Times
readers. Using internet search engines to find the addresses of
federal agents was considered a "special skill" which the majority of
people don't reasonably possess. Although Leen pointed out that even
his five-year-old could access a search engine and this was hardly
demonstrative of a special skill, this argument was lost on the judge
who had previously demonstrated an almost total lack of knowledge in
the area during the trial.
The other factor was that Bell showed no remorse over
authoring Assassination Politics. Several times both the prosecutor
and judge mentioned, in a style redolent of Soviet courts, that Bell
hadn't" recanted" his essay, and therefore needed to be imprisoned
"for the safety of the public."
The Assistant U.S. Attorney, Robb London, repeatedly stressed during the
trial that Bell had not retracted or recanted his "Assassination Politics"
essay (Bell characterized this as a thoughtcrime prosecution).
See:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42860,00.html
>"It's still on the Internet today," London said during the second day of
>the trial in federal district court. "He has not retracted it."
John Young has posted the first two days of Bell's tesimony:
http://cryptome.org/jdb040601.htm
http://cryptome.org/jdb040901-2.htm
Background on U.S. v. Jim Bell:
http://www.cluebot.com/search.pl?topic=ap-politics
-Declan
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Received on Aug 31 2001
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