TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102290/1022110.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 120 lines

                                                                                LAW, Page 60

Making War on WAR


An Alabama civil rights advocate invokes liability doctrine in
a bid to drive a California race-hatred monger out of business

By JAMES WILLWERTH/PORTLAND


    Angry knots of buzz-cut skinheads and helmeted police
circled each other warily in the halls of Oregon's Multnomah
County courthouse last week. Close by, in a marble-pillared
courtroom hidden behind security gates, two men stood before
a civil court judge and began a legal duel that involved an
unusual amalgam of crimes and punishments: charges of murder
and racism, to be measured by the strictures of tort liability.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," intoned civil rights
crusader Morris Dees, "we're going to ask you to return a
verdict so big that it will put Tom Metzger out of business."

    In taking aim at Metzger, 52, and his son John, 22, Dees is
trying to cripple an admitted "racial separatist" and leader
of a neo-Nazi movement known as the White Aryan Resistance
(WAR). Dees, director  of the Southern Poverty Law Center in
Montgomery, was using an unusual weapon: the common-law
principle of "vicarious liability," most frequently invoked
against employers for their workers' negligence. Simply put,
Dees and his fellow lawyers sue national racist organizations
on behalf of the families of victims of violent acts, charging
that the organizations should incur heavy civil penalties for
their indirect role in the violence. In 1987 Dees bankrupted
the Alabama-based United Klans of America with a $7 million
judgment for the family of Michael Donald, 19, who was shot and
hanged by U.K.A. thugs in 1981 in Mobile.

    In Portland, Dees and colleague Elden Rosenthal are asking
a $10 million punitive judgment against WAR and the Metzgers.
A member of WAR's Portland affiliate, East Side White Pride,
was convicted last year of murder in the 1988 beating death of
Mulugeta Seraw, a 27-year-old Ethiopian man; two other members
were convicted of first-degree manslaughter in the case.
Metzger, a television repairman, and his son run WAR from their
family's home in Fallbrook, Calif., north of San Diego. The
organization's cable-television show, Race and Reason, is
carried on 50 cable-access channels, and WAR operates 23
telephone hot lines. Its newspaper, WAR, runs articles and
cartoons ridiculing Jews and nonwhites and often urges violence
against them in the name of self-defense.

    The link between the Metzgers and the Portland murder, Dees
alleges, was WAR national vice president David Mazzella, 20.
The senior Metzger sent Mazzella to Portland in September 1988,
the civil rights advocate charges, to organize East Side White
Pride into a more militant street-fighting group. Dees'
evidence includes a letter from John Metzger to Portland
members that says Mazzella is coming "to show you how we
operate." Dees charges that Mazzella promptly led the local
racists out to beat up black and Hispanic victims.

    Seraw, who worked as an Avis airport shuttle-bus driver,
lived near an apartment where the White Pride group were
drinking one night, and was attacked with two friends while
returning from a party. A skinhead named Kenneth Mieske came
up behind Seraw with a baseball bat and struck his head "as
hard as you'd hit a center field ball," Dees told the jury last
week. Then Mieske stood over the fallen Seraw and hit him
repeatedly, splitting open his skull.

    Dees is trying to prove any of a variety of related kinds
of liability: that WAR and the Metzgers "through their agents"
encouraged the killing; that the Metzgers and the Oregon
skinheads formed a "civil conspiracy" leading to murder; that
Seraw's death was caused by the Metzgers' "reckless" and
"negligent" selection of a violence-prone agent to organize the
Portland group. "This is a plain old wrongful-death suit in a
state court," explained co-counsel Rosenthal. "It is a
common-law course of action that doesn't bother with fancy
federal or state civil rights laws."

    The Oregon chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union,
for one, is concerned about aspects of the case. In an amicus
curiae brief, the chapter urged that charges involving
"negligent" and "reckless" speech be dropped, reasoning that
a finding for the plaintiff on those grounds could have a
chilling effect on First Amendment freedoms. A.C.L.U. lawyer
Michael H. Simon adds, however, that adequate proof that Tom
Metzger intended to cause serious harm by sending agents to
Oregon would void his concern.

    Acting as his own lawyer, WAR leader Metzger is casting
himself as a beleaguered populist, but not an instigator of
violence. "I'm a white racial separatist," Tom Metzger says,
"and I can sit down with any person, white, black or Oriental,
and talk about it." Metzger's easygoing cracker-barrel manner
in Portland is belied by the angry messages he tapes for WAR
telephone lines. There he calls nonwhites "mud people" and
"assorted scum"; attorney Dees is "Morris the pervert"; trial
judge Ancer L. Haggerty, who is black, is an "Uncle Tom"; and
the trial, says Metzger, is a "legal lynching."

    Dees will attempt to introduce in evidence other Metzger
tapes, including one in which the senior Metzger observes that
those who killed Seraw performed a "civic duty." If Dees
convinces the jury there is a vicarious liability connection
and wins a heavy award, Metzger will probably lose his family's
home and the WAR offices. Future earnings could also be
attached, as they were in the Klan case. The Klan, says Dees,