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"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws."
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
On June 4, 1997 the trial of the only Viper Militia defendant to face a jury -- after months in jail, 10 have pleaded guilty to one charge or another, while one still awaits trial -- got underway before Judge Earl H. Carroll in the federal district courthouse in downtown Phoenix.
At the end of the two-week trial, late on a Wednesday afternoon June 18, the jury began its deliberations on the single charge of "conspiracy to make or possess unregistered destructive devices" against 47-year-old air conditioning installer and Vietnam-era Army veteran Chuck Knight.
The "overt acts" Knight was accused of committing as part of the Arizona militia group? Standing guard while other militia members practiced blowing up sand dunes with homemade explosives out in the desert, and participating in a discussion during which the Vipers agreed to buy some blasting caps.
Charles Knight was never alleged to have owned or handled explosives, nor any illegal or untaxed firearm. He never fired a gun at anyone in anger, is never alleged to have harmed anyone, nor stolen anything, nor threatened anyone with harm ... unless, of course, we count the government, which obviously feels VERY threatened by the existence of groups like the Viper Militia, despite the fact no militia group can be shown to have killed anyone in recent years -- compared to the estimated annual death toll of America's inner-city street gangs, now hovering around 1,200 corpses per year.
After taking off a three-day weekend, the jury trooped back into the courtroom on Tuesday, June 24, to report they were hopeless deadlocked. The judge asked them whether, with further deliberations, they might reach a verdict. The foreman replied "No."
But Judge Carroll was not satisfied. He sent the 12 back to the jury room, instructing them that they would not be released until they had reached a verdict, and that the verdict must be unanimous.
Ninety minutes later they returned, and found Chuck Knight guilty.
The Viper Militia case may be a watershed in the struggle to preserve the right of private Americans to bear arms.
Following the original First of July bust of the 14-member outfit last year (two "members" turned out to be paid government informants), President Clinton made a Rose Garden announcement, saying "I'd like to begin today by saluting the law enforcement officers who made arrests in Arizona yesterday to avert a terrible terrorist attack."
The initial government spin was that the Vipers had specific plans to bomb government buildings and commercial television towers, some of which they had actually videotaped from the outside. But that story started to erode almost immediately.
By the time ATF case agent Steven Ott was testifying at a pre-release hearing in Phoenix July 7, he told the court his snitch "felt there was absolutely no plan to conduct any bombings of these buildings at that time," which is why the ATF never informed any occupants of those buildings that they were in any danger.
Judge Carroll let half the defendants go home "on their own recognizance" that day a year ago -- no bail required -- and Chuck Knight still drives around Phoenix a free man today, running what's left of his air conditioner business, as he awaits sentencing Sept. 8.
Is this the way we treat dangerous terrorists?
By July 14 of 1996, reporter Louis Sahagun of the liberal, anti-gun Los Angeles Times was reporting "The Viper case now threatens to backfire on federal agencies that heralded it as a breakthrough in the war against domestic terrorists."
ATF supervisor Ott admitted under oath that his undercover snitch in the Viper Team had urged the other members to rob banks to further their cause, but that they all refused, Sahagun of the Times was reporting by then. There was even "talk" of the undercover state Game & Fish informant who infiltrated the group becoming the organization's leader, Ott testified.
"We told him, 'Absolutely no'," Ott said, though the snitch was apparently still allowed to provide a place for the group to meet.
I called Chuck Knight, father of four children aged 16 to 26 (and stepfather of two more boys), in Phoenix July 8, and asked him why he thought the jury finally voted to convict.
"The jury was convinced by the tantrums thrown by the prosecutors that this was a dangerous group. There was hardly any mention made of Chuck Knight. Mostly that these guys had machine guns, and that Gary Bauer had, unbeknownst to most of the rest of us, built seven hand grenades."
(Bauer, Vietnam veteran of both the 101st and 87th Airborne Divisions, recipient of the Purple Heart and other awards for valor, pleaded guilty to multiple counts of owning weapons the government taught him to use, and is now serving nine years in the Federal Correctional Facility in Sheridan, Ore.)
Defense attorney Ivan Abrams objected to the government's hauling machine guns belonging to other Vipers into the courtroom, since Knight was not charged with owning any such weapons. Objection overruled.
I told Knight I'd heard that some of the "unregistered machine guns" presented by the prosecution had actually been built by the government out of spare parts found at the homes of the various militia members.
"This is the way the law reads: If they can take parts and with eight hours of professional work by professional gunsmiths working full time in Washington, D.C., make it fire more than one round, then it was a machine gun. There was a guy who published a magazine piece on this a couple of years ago, a guy who took a wrecked Volvo and in about seven hours made a weapon that would fire four or five rounds. So by the legal definition used in this case the Volvo was, technically, a machine gun. We're talking about professional gunsmiths, with access to sophisticated machine shops."
Surely the best defense, then, would be to challenge the law as ridiculous, to ask the jury to acquit based on the statute or ATF regulation being unconstitutionally broad?
"The attorney is not allowed to challenge the law, he's there to prove I didn't violate the law. Judge Earl H. Carroll said 'There won't be any constitutional issues discussed in this court'."
Why does Knight thinks 10 out of his 12 fellow militiamen took the plea bargain?
"You don't have a clue to the terrorist tactics that were employed. ... Hank (decorated veteran Henry Overturf) was beat up while in jail, and Rick Walker nearly died because they would not give him his medicine, he's a diabetic with a heart problem ..."
Still, the average citizen assumes the jury gets to weigh all the issues, that the defense is free to present its explanation of how the Second Amendment renders the law in question null and void ...
"No, you absolutely can't present any defense you want," Knight protests. "There are so many things you're not allowed to say."
Knight, himself, would have faced a lesser sentence had he taken the plea bargain.
"I'm so glad I'm a Christian. I don't want to end up standing in front of God someday and saying, 'I didn't believe, so I took a plea bargain and lied about my whole life to get out of trouble. I think my actions are telling him loud enough that I trust him. ..."
Although Knight was a deacon at his last church, "folks at the church didn't even bother calling me" after his arrest, he explained.
A friend invited Knight to visit the First Institutional Baptist Church, in downtown Phoenix, instead. At first, Knight didn't understand why his friend laughed that the reporters wouldn't follow or bother him there. He did once he arrived.
"This new church is mostly a black church, there are maybe six white people, and these people have been just wonderful, they've welcomed me with open arms. ... I have 300 little aunties that come over and pinch me on the cheek and tell me how proud they are of what I'm doing. One of my friends there took me aside and said, 'You know Chuck, black people understand, more than you can know, what it is to be falsely arrested, to be falsely accused and convicted.'
"To be amongst them and to hear the stories, and have these people reach out to me like they have, ... they have literally saved my life. I was suicidal when I went there. I was rescued from the brink, and I don't say that lightly. This coming Sunday will be my one-year anniversary, the only Sunday I missed was the weekend we took Donna to California to surrender" for his wife's one-year term in the women's federal prison in Dublin, Calif.
"They've all but put me out of business. ... I have clients that are afraid to have me there because they're afraid they'll be put under surveillance. The guy who's most terrified is an orthodontist who's had some run-ins with the IRS. He said, 'Chuck, I know they're out to get anything they can on you, so I just can't have you around, I just can't stand to go through all that again. ...' That's the saddest thing I've ever heard, that's how close we are to Hitler's Germany. America is like ancient Rome, this is bread and circuses now. ... They're trying to make everyone a federal felon so we'll all lose our firearms rights.
"The fight's over. There's no one left to fight. You may be allowed to store food and keep a weapon, but you're not allowed to talk to anyone about it. ... If a police officer stops you for a traffic offense they can now search your car. So many of our constitutional rights are gone, I'm heartsick. I've prayed all my life for what God wants, and I know I'm doing what God wants, I only wish I could have been chosen to do something more useful. It doesn't make it any easier day to day. I miss Donna like I never believed I could."
What was his wife's offense?
"They had nothing on her except that she knew these people and she knew they were making explosives to go blow up out in the desert, and she spoke Politically Incorrectly and talked about what we should do if, if, if. ... There was never any plan. Under the law, you have to have a plan for an explosive to become a destructive device, and without that plan ...
"My argument centered around the fact that there was no plan to harm anyone," explains defense attorney Abrams. "Who was the target of these weapons of destruction? Where were they going to be used and when and how? Were they going to be thrown? ... And every one of these questions resulted in the answer, 'I don't know.' So there was no plan and no intent. And if intent is required for a criminal conspiracy, there's no crime. Is it a crime to bury ammonium nitrate, to have these devices ready to go in case of emergency? No."
"The Pentagon has contingency plans, but we're not allowed to have contingency plans," reports Phoenix writer Fran Van Cleave, a friend of Knight's co-defendant Dean Pleasant. "You wouldn't believe the sneering and sarcastic tone of the prosecutors," says Van Cleave, who sat through the trial. "According to the prosecution, we can't credit any discussions of how we might someday have a government more tyrannical than what we have now. That can't possibly have been what they meant.
"They even demonized an old, Army-surplus canteen. The prosecutor held it up and said 'See, they were even using military-style equipment.' Well, they pointed out Dean worked in a donut factory; what else did they think he could afford except Army surplus?"
I asked Knight what he believes the government's real goal is, in pressing such prosecutions.
"Their goal is to disarm the public. This is to make sure everyone knows that if they can put me in prison for five years for going out to two field exercises in six months, after 15 years in business in this town, meeting the public all day every day, a church-going guy, a good father ... if we can throw this guy in prison, think what we can do to you.
"If we tell you you can't have any guns, you better get all the guns out of your house right now, law or no law. If they can terrorize my wife into taking a year -- she pled guilty to the same charge I'm up on, she took a plea bargain and got a year and a day -- I've got to be made an example of. You just don't fight it when the government comes after you; that's not allowed."
In The Federalist No. 29, of course, Alexander Hamilton argued that the "people at large" must be "properly armed and equipped" so that "If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights and those of their fellow citizens."
And that "body of citizens," the founders all agreed, is "the militia."
In The Federalist No. 46, James Madison argued "The ultimate authority proposed new, stronger central government that they need never fear any spread of federal tyranny, since any encroachments by the federal government would "provoke plans of resistance," and "an appeal to a trial of force."
One has to wonder whether the Constitution would ever have been ratified, had Mr. Madison immediately added, "Of course, if any citizens who possess arms actually get together to discuss making plans of resistance, they'll be promptly rounded up and imprisoned for five years."
That's the sentence Chuck Knight now faces at his Sept. 8 sentencing: up to five years in a federal pen.
"It's hard to tell what crime Chuck has committed," writes his attorney, Ivan Abrams, in a personal note to me dated July 4. "The conspiracy charge is so broad that he may be 'guilty' of associating with machine gunners, thinking too much about fresh fertilizer, camping in the desert while dressed in cammies, or, worst of all, having a friend who had a friend who had a wife who bought a nasty book.
"I think the latter is the most heinous offense of all, given the power of books to instill criminal mindsets in even the most innocent of folks. It is truly a good thing that our government has the resources with which to protect us from the dangers of The Anarchist's Cookbook (now in its 22nd edition) and The Militiaman's Handbook."
Although some material from the Fully-Informed Jury Association was placed on cars in the court parking lot in Phoenix, instructing jurors of their long-established historical right to ignore the judge's instructions and acquit if they felt the law was an affront to the Constitution or their consciences (as juries did 23 times in a row to end the Salem witch trials, and again in the 1850s to block prosecutions under the Fugitive Slave Act), "The judge instructed people not to read it, to throw it away or bring it to him unread," Knight says. He also reports the juror questionnaire was designed to screen out those honest enough to admit they had any knowledge -- and willingness to exercise -- those traditional jury rights.
"When the jury came back hung, and he asked them if there was any chance of reaching a verdict if he sent them back and they said no, (the judge) was bound by law to declare a mistrial, but he did not. ... Instead he sent them back. And I have a feeling the jury thought they were going to be there forever if they didn't come back with a unanimous verdict. ...
"They said after the fact that they didn't feel I was guilty," Knight reports, "that the law was too broad. (Juror) Chuck Wahn said that in a broadcast interview. He's a 50-ish guy, he was almost in tears. But it doesn't help me any. ... It would have been nice if I had a juror or two with some guts. The jurors in the William Penn case (London, 1670) were tortured by the judge, and they still refused to convict."
"The jurors are quoted in the newspaper down here as saying we thought Chuck Knight was a nice guy, but there just wasn't any choice, the judge said you have to ignore your hearts and enforce the law," explained defense attorney Abrams in a telephone interview two days after the verdict. "I even dropped in (a reference to) the Fugitive Slave Act at that point, but the judge had ordered us not to discuss jury nullification, and I saw him coming up off the bench at me ..."
Yet, surprisingly enough, Abrams says the jury included gun owners. "It was much better than what you usually get in Phoenix. We had people who shoot recreationally and have been to gun shows. But what they were afraid of was this really bad compound word called 'ammonium nitrate.' Our timing couldn't have been worse, thank you Mr. McVeigh -- he went on trial the same time." Abrams says he moved for a mistrial on the grounds that the ongoing McVeigh trial in Denver (for the 1996 bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City) was coloring the atmosphere, "but it was not granted."
(McVeigh, kicked out of the only militia meeting he is ever known to have attended, received his munitions training while serving with Uncle Sam's First Infantry Division in that hotbed of international terrorism, Fort Riley, Kansas.)
"Aren't they just speeding up Darwinism?" I asked attorney Abrams of the government's prosecutions of these highly-visible, "public" militia units. By shutting down the goofier militias, the guys who parade around in public in camouflage fatigues, aren't they just teaching those who profoundly fear and distrust the government how to be more secretive, more serious, more professional ... and simultaneously walling them off from the influence of more moderate voices?
"But that's what they want to do," the self-described liberal Democrat replied. "Look at the War on Drugs, which is dependent on evil men with evil-sounding Hispanic names: Marcos Fernando Guzman. And the more of them we can create, we have our enemy and our target and then we can create our government agency. It is to the government's advantage to make more and badder militias, because the worse they are, the more agencies like the ATF can come out and say, 'We are the first line of defense, we are saving the nation from ruin, we need money from Congress.'
"We're in a terrible state as a nation in that we have no enemies. So what better enemy to create than ugly guys in ugly clothes, redneck racists running around killing people with stinking bags of fertilizer?
"Sadly, Chuck Knight ain't no racist; he ain't no white supremacist; he's no Christian religious fanatic. I'm a Jew; I don't think he's going to eat me. I respect Chuck and we will remain friends.
"You put these guys from New York out here where the real disaffection is, and they'll be shocked first of all at the depth of it. I'm shocked at the depth of the disaffection, but also at the way it permeates all layers of society. I don't know anyone who trusts the government, including my father who has a PhD law degree, but you get him out here for a breath of fresh air, and he starts to talk like one of them.
"I really do think the government wants to encourage the militias, which is why you get agents provocateurs like (John 'Doc') Schultz," alias Private Investigator Scott Jason Wells, the former Colorado State Trooper who infiltrated the Vipers on his own initiative after taking a job at the Phoenix gun store they frequented, and then shopped his "undercover" services to numerous agencies -- he was reportedly turned down cold by the FBI -- for five months before attracting the attention of the Arizona Department of Game & Fish, and then the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ... who eventually paid him $12,000 for his "services."
When Schultz had proposed to the rest of the group that they rob banks, and Chuck Knight replied "That's the last thing we'd ever do," Schultz's testimony for the government "was that they were just prioritizing," Abrams laughs. "I thought when he said that we were home free, if anything would show the absurdity of the case that would be it. I asked, 'What was the second-to-last thing they were going to do?' but the question was thrown out."
By focusing the nation's fears on these new bogey-men, "It certainly takes attention away from Bill Clinton and his sexual proclivities, so Chuck Knight's a very important matter," attorney Abrams explains. "One little air conditioner repairman in Phoenix Arizona rises to a very important position.
"It's very Hitlerian, sort of like the Reichstag Fire, set probably by Hitler's boys, but it served as a wonderful excuse for rounding up all the Communists, all the Nazis' political enemies. ... The whole idea of individual freedom is lost in the current administration."
I asked former federal prosecutor Abrams if he was ready to join a militia, himself.
"I'm going to keep practicing with my Winchester Model '94 in 30-30, and my Glock 23, and keep buying as much ammunition as I can possibly afford. government, and not be like this jury and say 'We didn't want to convict him, but we had to; we didn't have any choice.' I'm just really appalled at the ability of the American people to just turn over authority to the central government. ..."
"The conspiracy laws are an obscenity," says Chuck Knight. "You can hammer anyone with a conspiracy, all they have to do is talk. The way I read the Constitution, if no one has been hurt, if there is no victim, there is no crime."
Contributions to help fund Chuck Knight's appeal may be sent to the Charles Knight Legal Defense Fund, Account No. 14928432, Bank One, 4922 E. Bell Road, Scottsdale Ariz. 85251
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Readers may contact him via e-mail at vin@lvrj.com. The web site for the Suprynowicz column is at http://www.nguworld.com/vindex/. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas, NV 89127. This essay originally appeared in the September, 1997 edition of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
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