Wednesday 3 June 2009

Not just terrorists, but racketeers too!

Now here's a dandy idea from Jade7243 at TPMCafe: Use anti-racketeering legislation against the anti-abortionists, or as she calls them, 'the extremist anti-abortion conspiracy'.
RICO or Racketeering Influenced Criminal Organization, is a collection of statutes that can be used to prosecute organized crime -- like the Mafia -- but is not limited to those kinds of groups.

Using RICO instead of domestic terrorism would allow prosecute of not just the shooter, but those who conspired with him to commit murder, those who raised money in support of the RICO activities, In short, it is not just Roeder, but Randall Terry, any and all of the other leaders and members of anti-abortion groups which have either directly or indirectly called for violence against abortion providers or their families. conceivably, the Bill O'Reillys or Sean Hannitys, Glenn Beck and countless other small-time talk radio hosts or newsletter writers, bloggers, documentary film producers, etc., whose incendiary rhetoric would incite violence from their followers.

She quotes lots of sections of the law to explain how it might work.

Sounds good to me.

UPDATE: That link is busted. The post has disappeared. I wonder why.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Canadian law has a provision that allows private individuals to initiate prosecutions. Remember Moe Sihota using it back in the 80's? It didn't work because he had a weak case but that's beside the point. What I want to know, is does U.S. law have a similar provision? Because then women wouldn't need to wait for timorous elected officials to act.

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