Rod Coronado Trial Dates set in San Diego

I realize that this MAY be what Rod wants, and i respect his wishes (altho not necessarily his lawyers or pressagents, but this telling people not to demonstrate, and deciding on what clothes people should wear to a public trial is a political mistake. Demonstrations are important esepcially in conservative places to literally dmonstrate what support a defendant has. And it's important to get numbers filling the seats in the courtroom, rather than tell people how and how not to dress. If this is the call of a non-movement lawyer, Rod better be careful, becuase he needs a political defense to win,and this call may backfire.

might be more to it looking at it from the outside of the defense team. also, guess when one is faced with 20 yrs max penalty; hard to say what the logic is for asking certain things about court demeanor.

Forbes Covers Rod's Trial

Retired activist Rod Coronado on trial for intending to incite illegal acts.

By vk hopkins

It is not a First Ammendment trial if the feds prove intent. Is that possible?
"... the question is to what extent does the speech lose its protection when the speaker intends it to be used for specific violence," said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "And then the difficulty is that judgments about a person's motive are often quite mushy."


Keywords: Bronx, Human Rights, Civil Rights,


Two Children and A Small Garden Beats 5 years in Slammer

come on ya'll, Rod can use some wide-ranging media. T
ell everyone to write or let San Diego and California media of all kinds know
that he really, REALLY, is a nice guy and he deserves to retire in peace...

really!


Talk Radio anyone?


Associated Press
Eco-Radical on Trial Under Terror Law
By ALLISON HOFFMAN 09.11.07, 12:01 PM ET



SAN DIEGO - A few hours after a $50 million condo project burned down, apparently in an eco-terror attack, Earth Liberation Front spokesman Rod Coronado stood in front of a San Diego audience and explained how to build a homemade Molotov cocktail.

Now, Coronado is going to trial in federal court on a single count of distributing information on explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction with the intent that his listeners commit illegal acts of violence, a charge that could land him in prison for up to 20 years under post-Sept. 11 legislation.

Prosecutors say Coronado, a longtime environmental activist renowned for helping sink whaling ships and destroying mink farms and animal research labs, wanted people to follow in his footsteps - although they do not link him to the condo project fire.

In court documents, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Parmley wrote that Coronado told his audience that "there is no other way to deal with these places than fire" and later told the television program "60 Minutes" that he was "asking for people courageous enough to take those risks for what they believe in."

Coronado's trial begins on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Now 41 and recently married, the activist says the abrupt shift in America's tolerance for violence and civil disobedience dramatically changed the landscape for environmental activism in a way he didn't recognize until he was charged.

"In today's world, people striving for social change through the mediums that I have chosen are lumped together with the kinds of people who do fly airplanes into buildings," Coronado said recently from his home in Tucson, Ariz.

Jurors hearing the trial before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller will have to decide whether Coronado was simply exercising his First Amendment right to speak publicly about illegal activities or trying to inspire his listeners to go out and commit eco-terrorist acts in the name of conservation.

"What Coronado said is only very slightly different from what textbooks or newspapers routinely describe, so the question is to what extent does the speech lose its protection when the speaker intends it to be used for specific violence," said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "And then the difficulty is that judgments about a person's motive are often quite mushy."

As a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front - a shadowy group named one of the FBI's top domestic terrorism targets - Coronado was a high-profile advocate of arson and other illegal tactics.

He arrived in San Diego on Aug. 1, 2003, hours after an early morning fire destroyed a five-story, 206-unit apartment complex, an underground parking garage and a construction crane in the University City area. A 12-foot banner left at the scene read: "If you build it, we will burn it. The ELFs are mad."

No one has ever been charged in connection with that fire, the costliest act of eco-terrorism in U.S. history.

At the lecture he gave that night, Coronado demonstrated how to make an incendiary device out of an apple-juice jug after an audience member asked about his tactics in a 1992 arson at a Michigan State University mink research facility, for which he served nearly five years in federal prison.

Coronado says he was simply answering a question, not inciting people to any specific action.

"It was a question about how I personally had carried out a specific action, which I'd already gone to prison for and paid for with four years of my life," Coronado told The Associated Press. "I guess I'm one of those naive Americans who was raised to believe that free speech was a protected right and that our government didn't imprison people for expressing opinions contrary to their own."

He wasn't charged until 2006. By then, he had gotten into trouble with Arizona authorities for disrupting a government mountain lion hunt in 2004 with other members of Earth First!, a group best known for forest protests aimed at halting logging. He was sentenced to eight months in prison for conspiring to impede a federal officer and destroying government snare traps and sensors.

In September 2006, Coronado renounced violence, writing that the "economic sabotage" favored by environmentalists in the 1980s and 1990s should be set aside in favor of building environmentally sustainable communities.

"I almost feel like it's almost more of a disservice when (environmental activists) engage in tactics that might be considered equally unjust," Coronado said. "It's not that I don't recognize their importance historically, but there's just not enough return when we engage in tactics that may feel good at the time but don't gain anything long term."

By vk hopkins http://supportrod.org

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Local San Diego Activists harrassed and jailed

Sep 12, 2007 03:56AM EDT

mary stewart
Here is what its like for activists in San Diego:::

'Chilling effect'


Activist says arrest was an attempt t silence her
by Kelly Davis


Danae Kelley still isn't sure why she spent four days in jail last month. On Aug. 18, the 23-year-old joined a dozen animal-rights activists in picketing the La Jolla home of billionaire-philanthropist Ernest Rady. Rady, Kelley said, is on the board of directors of Wachovia Bank; Wachovia invests in a company called Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), and the group wanted to let Rady--and, by default, his neighbors--know that Huntingdon, which runs animal-testing labs throughout the world, does terrible things to its test subjects. The goal was to get Rady to convince Wachovia to divest itself of Huntingdon stock. Kelley said she didn't know that Rady and his wife had been the victims of a home-invasion robbery in February. If she'd known, she would have called off the protest, she said.


While tactics of some protest groups (mostly in Europe) against Huntingdon employees and investors can be extreme--slashed tires, death threats and significant intimidation--Kelley insists that no one did anything in La Jolla beyond chanting and leafleting, and they were in front of Rady's house for only 10 to 15 minutes.

"We're all pretty respectful," she said.


Picketing a residence is a misdemeanor under San Diego's municipal code, said San Diego Police Lt. Brian Ahern. But, Ahern explained, Rady would have had to file a complaint (he didn't), or the police would have had to witness the protest (they didn't).


Police stopped the group as it was leaving the neighborhood. Members were searched, questioned and photographed, but only Kelley was arrested. A detective told her she was being charged with two felonies: stalking and making a terrorist threat (her booking sheet shows she was charged only with the latter). She was taken to Las Colinas jail and held on $50,000 bail until Wednesday, Aug. 22, the deadline for the district attorney to either arraign her or let her go. She was home by midnight.


Kelley said she knew the charge wouldn't stick. "We have audio of [the protest]--we replayed the audio, and there were no threats."



Compared with two years ago, Kelley's August jail stint was brief. In summer 2005, Kelley and two other activists were jailed for several weeks after they refused to testify to a grand jury about a talk given by environmentalist Rod Coronado in Hillcrest on Aug. 1, 2003. Coronado's talk happened the same day an early-morning arson fire in University City burned down a condo building that was under construction. A sign left at the site attributed the fire to the eco-saboteur movement Earth Liberation Front. Coronado, once an unofficial ELF spokesperson, was at home in Arizona when the fire happened and didn't know about it until reporters swarmed him before his talk.


But prosecutors got him anyhow. This week, he went on trial in San Diego federal court because, at the talk, he picked up an apple-juice jug and explained how, in his more radical days, he'd turn a similar container into an incendiary device. Prosecutors argued that someone could take that information and use it to commit a crime. Coronado's attorneys counter that bomb-building instructions are available online and their client was responding to an audience member's question--proof that making a bomb from a juice jug wasn't part of his planned speech.


No arrests have been made in the arson case, but authorities still have their eye on Kelley. Police and FBI agents contacted at least four activists from the La Jolla protest, Kelley said. The activists told her they were asked not about the protest but about Kelley, Coronado and the 2003 arson. Several told her that while she was being arrested, a police detective said to them, "Do you know what kind of a person [Kelley] is? I've been following her for two years."


That detective, J.K. Hudgins, said Kelley's arrest is part of an ongoing investigation, so he can't discuss it.


Kelley said she has no connection to the arson: "No--god, no," she said. She added that she doesn't claim affiliation with any activist group that engages in criminal activity. She might share the same motivations, but she prefers "leafleting and outreach" to get her point across.


Kelley sees her arrest as part of a larger movement by law enforcement to silence activists. While she was being handcuffed, she heard Hudgins say, "We're making an example out of her."


Hudgins denied saying that. "It's [against] a policy of the police department," he said.


Kelley has talked to Gerry Singleton, an attorney representing Coronado, and plans to file a wrongful-arrest lawsuit against the police department. Troy Pickard, a senior law clerk for Singleton, said the fact that Kelley's been a subject of an ongoing investigation only makes her case more interesting.


"The police have no business keeping tabs on political demonstrators," he said, "even leaders who are not committing any crimes."



Write to kellyd [at] sdcitybeat.com and editor [at] sdcitybeat.com.


9-12-07