[Ppnews] Court of Appeals Declines to Release Carrie Feldman Held On Contempt of Grand Jury

[Political Prisoner News]

Lauren Regan, Atty & Exec. Dir., CLDC, 541-687-9180
Ben Rosenfeld, Atty & Board Member, CLDC, 415-285-8091

For Immediate Release

January 29, 2010

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit Declines to Release 20 Year Old
Carrie Feldman, Jailed For More Than Two Months On Contempt of Grand Jury

Civil Liberties Monitors Charge That Federal Prosecutor Is On Personal Crusade
Against Anarchist Ideology; Courts Do Not Rein Him In

             Davenport, IA:  U.S. Attorney 
Clifford R. Cronk III is using his office’s 
investigation of an alleged 2004 animal 
rights-related break-in at the University of Iowa 
to harass and punish targets whom he claims 
identify as anarchists, a political ideology 
dating back to the early 19th Century.  To date, 
neither his superiors in the Department of 
Justice, nor the federal courts, have done 
anything to curtail his abuse of power.  In 
behavior reminiscent of the darkest days of the 
McCarthy witch hunts, Cronk argues in court 
documents that anarchists are domestic terrorists 
who should be locked up for posing a threat to 
civil society based on nothing but the prosecutor’s unfounded political bias.

             The Animal Liberation Front 
reportedly claimed credit for the 2004 break-in 
at the University of Iowa’s Psychology 
Department, removing lab rats and mice and 
vandalizing computers.  There were no reported 
injuries.  In November 2009, just days before the 
five year statute of limitations expired (the 
date after which the government could no longer 
bring charges), prosecutors subpoenaed Scott 
DeMuth, a 22-year old Dakota language student and 
sociology graduate student at the University of 
Minnesota, and 20-year old Carrie Feldman, to 
testify before a grand jury said to be 
investigating the incident.  The government gave 
no public reason for believing the two had any 
information.  Both appeared before the grand jury 
but refused on principle to testify, and each 
publicly denounced the process as a star chamber 
which utilizes secret evidence and deprives 
witnesses of their right to counsel and other basic constitutional protections.

             Over thirty years ago, Justice 
William O. Douglas expressed almost the identical 
sentiment, writing “This great institution of the 
past has long ceased to be the guardian of the 
people for which purpose it was created at 
Runnymede. . .Any experienced prosecutor will 
admit that he can indict anybody at any time for 
almost anything before any grand jury.”  United 
States v. Dionisio, 410 U.S. 19, 23 (1973 
(Douglas, J., dissenting, quoting Chicago-based 
district judge William Campbell).

             In clear retaliation for refusing to 
testify, U.S. Attorney Cronk had DeMuth indicted 
under the new Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act for 
conspiring to commit the lab break-in, despite 
the fact that the law was enacted two years after 
the break-in and cannot apply retroactively; 
despite the fact that DeMuth was a minor at the 
time of the alleged break-in; and despite the 
prosecutor’s apparent total lack of 
evidence.  Upon reviewing the so-called 
“evidence,” a federal magistrate judge wrote:

The Court viewed portions of a videotape 
depiction of the damage inflicted at the 
University of Iowa during this occurrence. At 
least four individuals could be seen during the 
taping of the event. Special Agent Reinwart was 
of the opinion that one of these individuals had 
a resemblance in terms of physique and stature 
with Demuth. However, Special Agent Reinwart did 
not testify that he knew Demuth participated in 
the occurrence.  (See Court’s Order of 11/24/09, p1-2.)

Nevertheless, U.S. Attorney Cronk is going 
forward with his prosecution of 
DeMuth.  Persecution is a better word for 
it.  After the court ordered DeMuth released from 
jail pending trial, the U.S. Attorney maneuvered 
to keep him locked up over the long Thanksgiving 
holiday, resorting to unethical and 
unconstitutional political stereotyping and guilt by association.  He argued:

[T]he defendant did not deny that he is an 
anarchist. He did not deny involvement with ALF. 
. .Defendant’s writings, literature, and conduct 
suggest that he is an anarchist and associated 
with the ALF movement. Therefore, he is a 
domestic terrorist. As such, he poses a serious 
of risk of danger to those he opposes and to law 
enforcement as well as a risk of flight to avoid 
prosecution.  (See Government’s Motion for 
Revocation of Release Order, 11-25-09, pg. 3.)

             Meanwhile, on November 17, the court 
found Carrie Feldman in contempt for refusing to 
testify before the grand jury, even though she 
never actually disobeyed the court’s 
order.  Rather, the court presumed that she would 
refuse to testify based on her prior 
statements.  “This is a plain violation of 
Supreme Court precedent,” said Lauren Regan, 
Executive Director of the Eugene Oregon-based 
Civil Liberties Defense Center.  “The witness 
must be brought before the grand jury and refuse 
to answer questions put to her in front of them 
before she can be found in contempt.”  In this 
case, after Feldman asserted a Fifth Amendment 
privilege not to testify, the court ordered her 
to accept immunity for her testimony, finding 
that this negated the privilege.  However, the 
court never sent her back before the grand jury before holding her in contempt.

             At the contempt hearing, Feldman’s 
lawyer put her father on the stand to testify 
that incarcerating her would be harmful to his 
ailing mother-in-law whom Feldman looks 
after.  The prosecutor pounced on this 
opportunity to interrogate her father 
irrelevantly about whether his daughter is an 
anarchist, rather than concern himself with the 
legal issues at hand.  (See transcript of hearing, 11-17-09.)

             “If the prosecutor had substituted 
the word ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’, or 
‘Christian’ or ‘Muslim’ for every utterance of 
the word ‘anarchist,’ correction by his superiors 
or the courts would have been swift,” said 
Attorney Ben Rosenfeld, a member of the Board of 
the Civil Liberties Defense Center.  “Mr. Cronk 
appears to have forgotten, and no one in charge 
seems to care, that we are not supposed to 
condemn entire groups of people based on their 
beliefs.”  Cronk later sought to defend his 
interrogation of Feldman’s father, writing:

By definition, anarchy is a “state of society 
without government or law” and an anarchist is “a 
person who seeks to overturn by violence all 
constituted forms and institutions of society and 
government, with no purpose of establishing any 
other system of order in the place of that 
destroyed.”  (See Government’s Sur Reply Brief, 1-21-10, pg. 10.)

Cronk did not attribute the quotations, which 
appear to come from dictionary.com, and which 
differ starkly from those found elsewhere, including at wikipedia.com.

             “He could not be more ignorant about 
what anarchism actually means,” Rosenfeld 
said.  “If he had read anything by actual 
anarchist thinkers, he would know that anarchism 
is an intellectual philosophy which holds that 
governments everywhere are constituted to protect 
the rich, that they share more repressive 
similarities than differences, and that we should 
all work together at the local and grass roots 
levels to lift up the meek among us.  In a sense, 
it is the best of libertarianism and democratic 
socialism combined.”  Lauren Regan 
added:  “Smearing all anarchists as violent 
criminals is like blaming all Christians for the 
murder of abortion doctors.  The irony is that by 
engaging in a political witch hunt, the U.S. 
Attorney is underscoring the anarchist critique 
of our current system, as well as people’s distrust of the grand jury process.”

             Mr. Cronk’s personal crusade is not 
without official context.  On January 14, 2006, 
FBI spokesman David Picard told CBS affiliate 
Channel 13 in Sacramento: “One of our major 
domestic terrorism programs is the ALF, ELF, and 
anarchist movement, and it’s a national program 
for the FBI.”  His statement echoes J. Edgar 
Hoover’s infamous description of the FBI’s 
ideologically-driven Counterintelligence Program 
(“COINTELPRO”), designed in Hoover’s words to 
“expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or 
otherwise neutralize” undesirable political 
targets.  Similar to Cronk’s conduct in this 
case, another federal prosecutor, Wallace 
Kleindienst, told reporters in December 2005, 
following animal rights activist Rod Coronado’s 
conviction for nonviolently disrupting a mountain 
lion hunt in Arizona: “I know he wasn’t tried 
here for being a violent anarchist. This trial 
wasn’t about Rod Coronado being a terrorist, but he is one.”

             The government’s careless and 
anti-constitutional syllogism that animal rights 
activists equal “anarchists” equal “domestic 
terrorists” appears to come from the upper 
echelons of the Department of Justice.  On 
January 20, 2006, in a press release announcing 
the first arrests in Operation Backfire, the 
Oregon-centered investigation into a series of 
politically motivated eco-arsons, FBI Director 
Robert Mueller vowed of the ALF and ELF:  “We are 
committed to working with our partners to disrupt 
and dismantle these movements....”  Since then, 
he has repeatedly revealed that the FBI is 
targeting anarchists generally.  For example, 
addressing the Senate Committee on Homeland 
Security and Governmental Affairs on September 
10, 2007, he equated anarchists with terrorists, 
saying: “Single issue groups and domestic 
terrorists, which include white supremacists, 
anarchists, and eco-terrorists, continue to be a concern.”

             “In light of such inflammatory 
remarks by the FBI’s own Director, it is clear 
that prosecutors like Mr. Cronk have been given 
the green light to ignore the Constitution and 
the law, and would seek to punish Carrie Feldman 
and Scott DeMuth based on nothing but his 
labeling of them as anarchists,” said Attorney 
Lauren Regan.  Rosenfeld added, “Our government 
should not be in the business of trying to 
‘dismantle’ political movements, as the FBI Director put it.”

             Meanwhile, more than two months 
after the court found her in contempt, 20-year 
Carrie Feldman still sits in jail, accused of no 
crime.  She appealed her contempt ruling, but in 
a 2-1 split decision issued on January 22, the 
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit 
declined to release her.  The majority gave no 
reason other than to say that “sealed documents 
[submitted by] the government ... indicate that 
the statute of limitations has not necessarily 
expired...” (emphasis added).  However, the 
dissenting Judge – who presumably viewed the same 
secret evidence submitted by the government – 
found that the statute of limitations had 
expired, and therefore that the government cannot 
hold Feldman under subpoena, since grand juries 
may not be used to gather evidence for 
prosecution once a crime has been charged, as it 
has in this case.  The Court did not address the 
allegations of prosecutorial bias, or whether the 
lower court erred when it found Feldman in 
contempt without sending her back into the grand 
jury room to testify.  (See Appellate Order, 1-22-10.)

             “Everyone thinks we’re moving toward 
a greater recognition of civil rights under 
Obama,” said Attorney Ben Rosenfeld.  “Instead 
we’re going backward – all the way back to the 
sedition laws, and the political inquisitions of Joseph McCarthy.”

             (For more information, see the 
support website for Carrie Feldman and Scott 
DeMuth at 
<http://cldc.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f4405adbf2a1180c42d196efe&id=d449d3d972&e=ee63b50338>www.davenportgrandjury.wordpress.com, 
where a number of the documents cited in this press release are posted.)




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