By Alan Bean

An Arlington, Texas family has filed a wrongful death suit after officers with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies broke down a door and killed an innocent, unarmed man.

This is an old, old story.  As an ATF agent quoted in the story says, officers never know what might be waiting for them behind a locked door.  For all they know, a gang of desperadoes, AK 47s at the ready, might be lying in wait.  You have to be prepared for every eventuality, right?

The chances of things ending badly increase with every additional officer involved in the raid.  All it takes is one paranoid kid or a budding sociopath eager for a little gun play and bad things are bound to happen.  A small, experienced unit with high standards of professionalism is much less likely to gun down innocent people than a ragtag assortment of officers who aren’t used to working together.

In this case, at least the ATF had the right house and they appear to have been looking for a genuinely dangerous individual.  But kicking down doors and storming into a room is an intrinsically dangerous undertaking.  The inevitable excuse when the innocent die is the old “I thought he had a gun” canard.  When you enter a room, it can take several seconds to evaluate whether the folks behind the door constitute a threat.  Since dead people can’t kill you, the chances that some undisciplined cowboy will shoot first and ask questions later are unacceptably high.  Anyone, even a child, could be armed.

The high degree of risk inherent in no-knock raids makes the occasional tragedy inevitable.  The officers should have known that the guy they were looking for didn’t own the home they were entering, and that they would likely encounter a family member with no connection to organized crime.  Much better to approach a suspect in such a way that the chances of collateral damage can be reduced.

Overwhelming force is great for officer safety, but it places the public at risk.  No-knock raids should be reserved for truly exceptional situations and I doubt the case described below qualifies.

Arlington family files wrongful death suit after ATF raid

dbarbee@star-telegram.com

The morning he was killed, Harry Wilson Aguilar Sr. stood in the kitchen of an Arlington apartment making school lunches for his grandchildren.

(more…)

By Clarence Walker

Assistant District Attorney Karen Plants was head of the narcotics unit of the Wayne County District Attorney Office in Detroit Michigan when the Inkster Police Department scored a major narcotic bust in 2005. Acting on a reliable tip, officers collected 47 kilos of cocaine, the largest haul the Inkster authorities ever had in its history.

This was the epitome of the American way to carry out “the war on drugs”: A swift take down of Alexander Aceval, Ricardo “Richard” Pena, Chad Povish and Brian Hill along with the seizure of the cocaine worth millions of dollars.

While the community celebrated the bust, the subsequent investigation blew the lid off an egregious case of corruption in Michigan’s Jurisprudence.  The drug bust included lies orchestrated by the prosecutor, the judge, the informant and the police.  The string of charges ranged from “obstruction of justice” to perjury.

Circuit Judge Mary Waterstone, in charge of the trials against Aceval and Pena, was complicit in the perjury scheme. She told a Michigan Attorney General investigator that prosecutor Plants expressed concern for the safety of Chad Povish who set up the men to be arrested. (more…)

By Alan Bean

Leaders insist that the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is not a denomination, and there is some truth to the claim.  The CBF doesn’t pass resolutions, has no statement of faith, and delegates to this week’s convention in Fort Worth weren’t delegates selected by individual churches.  If you wanted to attend, you could register for free on the CBF website, and over 1500 people did.

On the other hand, if you attend a church like Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship clearly fills the role of a denomination.  Broadway, largely due to its stance (or lack of stance) on the gay rights issue, is no longer affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention or the Baptist General Convention of Texas.  For us, the CBF serves as a denomination.

I attended as much of this weeks CBF gathering in Fort Worth as time would allow, serving as a greeter, attending work shops, chatting with the folks hawking wares and services at the Gathering Place and participating in evening worship.  Still, I missed all of the business sessions and most of the workshops and my conversations were largely limited to  the scattered handful of leaders and participants I know from the distant past.  This was the first CBF event I have ever attended, so I don’t have a large fund of actual experience to draw from.

I was a graduate student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville when the CBF was founded in 1991.  I was vaguely aware that Daniel Vestal, a conservative but not fundamentalist pastor, lost a close fight for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1989.  In those days, as many as 45,000 “messengers” from across the nation would flock to the annual conventions as both moderates and fundamentalist factions tried to turn out the vote.  By contrast, this year’s SBC gathering was attended by fewer that 8,000 people.  Vestal lost that fight and it soon became obvious that the conservative faction had taken control of the denominational apparatus.

Although SBC presidents have little formal control, they do make critical nominations to the all-powerful “Committee on Committees” (a tribute to “organization man” bureaucracy if ever there was one).  Since the Committee on Committees nominates people (usually male people) to the boards of various powerful institutions throughout the denomination, including six theological seminaries, ten years of fundamentalist presidents starting in 1980 represented a complete transfer of power.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship came to existence as a protest movement within the SBC that functioned primarily at the state level.  The fundamentalists held sway at the denominational level, but most of the money on which the denomination depended flowed through powerful state conventions.  In influential states like Texas and Virginia, CBF influence was so strong at the state level that pro-SBC conventions were formed so the denomination could relate directly to the more conservative churches.

As a moderate SBC leader told me back in the day, the power struggle in Baptist land was about sociology more than anything else.  The men and women of the CBF are high culture Baptists.  That may sound like a contradiction in terms, and in a sense it is.  How high culture can you be and still call yourself a Baptist?  CBF folks like beautiful art, semi-classical music and a well-turned phrase.  Well, some CBF churches use vestments, pipe organs and are slowly falling in love with the liturgical traditions of historic Christianity.  The quasi-denomination is built on the institutional foundation of churches, Baptist universities like Mercer and Baylor, and the long list of seminaries and theological schools spawned by the exodus of moderates from the SBC.  CBF people may be the most theologically and biblically literate Christians in America.  For all that, they retain a fondness for “the old songs” like Just as I am, and I Love to Tell the Story, they talk about missions, missionaries and “the mission field” a lot, and they take the Bible very seriously.

It’s complicated.

Gradually, the CBF has surrendered the dream of retaking control of the mother ship and has developed a separate identity.  The initial generation of CBF leaders is now old enough for retirement.  Last night, Daniel Vestal was feted and celebrated in a two-and-a-half-hour worship service that, though deeply meaningful to old timers, seemed a tad excessive to first-timers like me.

Old guard CBF leaders like Vestal came of age in the old Southern Baptist Convention and it shows.  Even during the strife of the 1980s, men like Vestal presented themselves as the true defenders of Baptist “distinctives” like world missions and evangelism. “We first lost our focus on evangelism,” Vestal lamented in 1989. “Then we lost our trust for each other. Now, we’re losing our viability as a denomination for world evangelization.”

I doubt this kind of rhetoric resonates with the scores of seminary and college students who attended the CBF gathering in Fort Worth, especially if evangelism means “saving souls” and “world evangelization” means disparaging other religions.  As the CBF and the SBC have drifted apart, both groups have redefined themselves.  The SBC has embraced the old “heaven and hell” Christianity so characteristic of frontier revivalism.  The evangelistic mission of the SBC may have been interpreted in softer terms by moderate SBC leaders between 1950 and 1975,  but the kinder, gentler evangelism had been thoroughly eradicated by 1990.  Since then, preachers who believe in a literal hell, a real heaven, and a sure-’nuff Satan have had the stage to themselves.

“The light shines in the darkness,” John’s Gospel tells us, and confident Christians have always been clear about their darkness and their light.  In the SBC, sinners are lost, they are going to hell, and nothing short of faith in the saving blood of Jesus will save them.  That message has always been popular in the South, especially in Bible Belt states like Texas, Mississippi and Alabama.

I left Southern Baptist life in 1994, shortly after the formation of the CBF, and this week’s conference was my first opportunity to witness the semi-denomination up close and personal.

If the sermon on the glory of God Vestal preached last night is anything to go by, the CBF loves the light but would rather not talk about the darkness.  Using every rhetorical tool in the preacher’s tool kit, Vestal tried to get his audience fired up about the glory of God.  He was only partially successful.

The CBF has always been unsure about the darkness.  Do they believe in a real Satan and a real hell? Some may and some may not; but it hardly matters since hardly anyone affiliated with the group is comfortable with these dark concepts.  Every good story needs an antagonist, a villain, and the CBF story doesn’t have one.  The Light of the world will be swallowed by the neon glitter of secular America unless we splash some tangible darkness onto the canvas, and I didn’t see much of that.

For too long, the unacknowledged Satan of the CBF has been the Grand Inquisitor fundamentalists who sent a generation of SBC moderates into exile (not quite an auto-da-fe, but close enough).  The CBF needs to do better than that.  The glory of God will have an ersatz feel until it is juxtaposed with truly dark evils like poverty, mass incarceration, global warming, anti-immigrant bigotry and the demonization of the gay rights movement.  There’s lots of material out there, but a sort-of-denomination spawned in conflict and controversy naturally wants to keep the lid on Pandora’s box.  Until recently, issues with any potential for controversy have been studiously avoided.

The younger generation of CBF people hunger and thirst for deep theological conversation about things like sex, the ecological crisis, justice, crime and punishment, immigration and all the other broken pieces of America.  Plenty of CBF people want the light to shine into genuine darkness.  Darkness-light issues found their way into some of the workshops I attended, but were addressed in the most general of terms and seldom mentioned in worship nor, I suspect, in business meetings.

This will need to change.  The trauma of being rejected by Mother Church takes a decade or two to get past, but the CBF is divided into folks older than me (who have a hard time letting go of past indignities), and people younger than me (who have little living memory of these events and long to move on).  Who will lead the CBF now that the beloved Rev. Vestal has retired?  That is the question of the hour.  For better or worse, they don’t make preachers like Vestal any more.

During a meeting of Texas Baptists, Bill Leonard, the dean of liberal Baptist historians, took us on a whirlwind tour of the state of Christian America.  In a day in which denominationalism is losing its meaning, he said, Baptists need to be tell the world who we are and who we are not.  I asked old church history prof if a generation of seminary students with no living memory of our Baptist holocaust might open the door to new things.

The Wake Forest professor didn’t give the yes-or-no answer I had expected.  It is a great blessing, he admitted, to live without the burden of history.  But the churches these students will enter are still living with these painful memories and pastors who don’t understand the historical context of their churches don’t always anticipate the trauma they can evoke with a single misplaced sentence.

I see his point.  And yet I long for leaders who are free to apply the light of God to the all-too-real darkness of current events.  The day is coming.  The younger generation of denominational leaders longs for social justice, isn’t the least bit hung up on social evils like cussing, drinking and gambling, and takes a compassionate view of issues like gay rights, immigration rights and the criminal justice system.  In time, these young women and men will be at the helm of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the self-definition Leonard calls for will begin.

By Alan Bean

Judges are generally hesitant to take matters out of the hands of a jury, but Tarrant County District Judge Dana Womack seems downright eager.   The record award of $13.7 million is gone like smoke and now it is the plaintiffs who must fork over court costs.

In other words, Womack didn’t just call for a do over; she arbitrarily inserted her personal judgment for that of the jury.

If the article below is anything to go by, the case seems to turn on the judge’s doubt that statement’s allegedly made by the defendants, Shannon Coyel, Gerald Coyel, Charlie Doescher and Pat Doescher, could actually be traced to these individuals.  I doubt we have heard the last of this story.

Judge throws out $14 million jury award in online libel case

BY DARREN BARBEE

dbarbee@star-telegram.com

A Tarrant County judge has thrown out a jury’s nearly $14 million Internet libel verdict in a case that garnered national attention and was called the largest such award involving online defamation.

With her ruling, state District Judge Dana Womack sided with the defendants who argued that the jury’s verdict was not supported by the evidence. The judgment, signed late last week, does not explain her reasoning. Womack declined through a court official to comment.

One of the defendants said he understood that the jury had wanted to send a message with its decision.

“But if you’re going to penalize somebody for doing it, make sure you get the people who did it,” said the defendant, Charlie Doescher, who lives in Kennedale.

The case originated after a woman employed by Mark and Rhonda Lesher accused them of sexually assaulting her. They were indicted but acquitted at trial.

The Leshers later sued, saying the woman and her husband, along with their employees, smeared them in blog postings to ruin the Leshers’ reputations. The case took years to get to the jury. In April, a Tarrant County jury voted 10-2 to award the couple $13.78 million. Defendants Shannon and Gerald Coyel and Doescher, who worked for the Coyels, were ordered to pay varying amounts of the award.

In a motion filed last month, the defendants’ attorneys argued that no evidence presented to the court tied them to the posts. A review “will show the IP address allegedly tied to Gerald and Shannon Coyel’s home is nowhere to be found,” the court document said. The motion also argued that no evidence supported an award of mental anguish for the Leshers, nor was there evidence that their reputations were injured and Rhonda Lesher’s beauty salon lost profits.

Rhonda Lesher, who said she moved after the online posts wrecked her business, said Tuesday that the verdict’s reversal was a “slap in the face.” She said the couple plan to appeal.

Many of the blog posts were vile — Lesher said there were more than 25,000 entries — including that her customers engaged in sexual perversions and molestations, drug dealing and other criminal activity. Among the posts, one stated “…they got ‘HERPIES’ and ‘AIDS’!” Another read, “These are the ‘SLIMEST’ ‘LYING’ ‘PERVERTED’ ‘CHILD MOLESTING’ ‘HELPLESS WOMAN RAPING’ ‘SCUM’ I have ever heard of!”

Lesher said she and her husband had asked for $5 million in damages, but the jury went far beyond that. Though she still feels she has been vindicated, the judge’s ruling “took my breath way.”

“I just felt gut shot,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, I had not spent any [of the award] money in my mind. I wasn’t counting my chickens before the eggs hatched. … We have worked for four years and have spent as much as we’ve spent to get to bottom of it to get some vindication.”

Lesher said the couple sold their ranch to pay for attorneys and have paid civil and criminal trial costs of more than $1 million. The couple still have a suit pending in Collin County against district attorney prosecutors for malicious prosecution, she said.

“The amount of torment and pain we have endured it’s really hard to put into words,” she said.

According to the lawsuit, Shannon Coyel, a former client of Mark Lesher, an attorney, accused the Leshers and one of their employees of sexually assaulting her. The criminal trial was moved to Collin County because of pre-trial publicity, and the jury acquitted all three in January 2009.

Coyel said the trial was “humiliating” and that she saw a counselor for more than two years to deal with her experiences, including the ordeal with the blog posts.

She said she copes through “My faith in God. I go to bed every night and I pray God takes my worries away,” she said.

Media reports about the jury’s verdict angered her, she said, because they came before the case was closed. Coyel said she was never worried about the money that she was supposed to pay — roughly $2 million.

“They would never get a dime from me because I don’t have a dime to give them,” she said.

She also said that the blog posts disgusted her and that her husband barely uses a computer. “Just to even read [the posts], there’s got to be something mentally wrong with you,” she said.

The judge, she said, did an excellent job and followed the law in her ruling.

“This is how the judicial system is supposed to work,” she said. “The judge … could see through all the smoke and mirrors.”

Doescher, who also had been ordered to pay money, said he did not know the Leshers and had never seen them until he walked into the courtroom.

“They were out for revenge,” he said.

Being dragged into the lawsuit was an ordeal for him, he said. “It hurt my life so much.”

In her ruling, Womack orders the Leschers to pay the defendants’ court costs.

Judge Joe Spurlock II, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, said judges have the ability to disregard jury verdicts, dismiss the case and have it retried or allow a person who wins to agree to reduce the award.

Judges in U.S. courts can set aside a verdict when they believe that it was somehow unjust, biased, prejudiced or otherwise compromised, said Spurlock, formerly a district judge in Fort Worth who also served on the appellate court.

“Judges hate to do this,” Spurlock said, noting that jury decisions are held in high regard as a foundational institution. “We only do it on those rare occasions that it’s not proper justice, it was just not properly served.”

Darren Barbee, 817-390-7126

By Alan Bean

In a recent post, I responded to a Curtis Knapp, a Baptist pastor in Kansas who believes the federal government ought to be executing homosexuals in accordance with the twentieth chapter of Leviticus.  I suggested that when the Bible is read through a Christological lens, the admonitions of Leviticus can be taken seriously, but not literally.  They are still in the Bible, but they are trumped by the higher vision of God revealed in Jesus (and in many parts of the Hebrew scriptures as well).

I gave a single example from the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus clearly distinguishes his message from the “eye-for-an-eye” demands of the Mosaic law.  But there are plenty of other examples.

In a captivating post called “When the atheists are right” law professor (and Friends of Justice board member) Mark Osler, points to the story of the Prodigal Son.  Responding to a Christian father who thought it was his duty to consign his dead son to hell, Osler introduces an alternative take on grace and the character of God.

And there, in the Book of Luke, is the story of the prodigal son — the younger of two, who demanded his inheritance and then squandered it through “dissolute living.” He hits bottom, having run through the money, and resolves to return to his father and repent. However, before he has a chance to say anything, his father runs to him, puts his arms around him and kisses him. There is love there, before repentance, even in the apparent absence of repentance. There is love before all; that is what Christ directs us to do.

The Elder Brother’s rejection of the Prodigal was solidly rooted in precept and principal, but it couldn’t be squared with the gracious heart of God.

Fred Clark’s Slacktivist blog uses Peter’s vision in Acts 10 in which a sheet containing animals which were “unclean” according to Levitical law accompanied by the spoken command: “arise, Peter, kill and eat.”

And what he understood was that his vision was not about dietary laws regarding “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air.” What Peter understood about Peter’s vision was that it was about Gentiles — about outsiders, about those people whom the laws of Moses said were law-breakers, unclean, an abomination.

Here is what Peter himself said about his own vision:

You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.

In Acts 10, God changed the rules.  Peter wasn’t informed that his interpretation of the dietary rules was wrong or that the ancient wall between Jew and Gentile was based on a misunderstanding; he was informed that a new vision of faith in action had burst upon the world.  If Peter interpreted his vision in light of the Jew-Gentile divide, we should apply it to the current antagonism between gay and straight Christians.

The Sunday after Barack Obama came out for marriage equality, Dallas pastor Freddie Haynes made a bold stand in the pulpit of Friendship-West Baptist Church in which he asked why Christians are so eager to major in areas that Jesus minored in.  Jesus majored in deliverance and compassion; judgment was a minor issue (unless he was talking about preachers).

This morning, my wife and I encountered these familiar words from Luke 13.  The setting is the healing of a woman who had been crippled for eighteen years.  Jesus’ religious critics are appalled that a Rabbi would heal on the sabbath, a clear violation of biblical teaching and rabbinic tradition.

Jesus replies,

You hypocrites!  Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?

In other words, the cold word of the law melts when brought into contact with the compassionate heart of God.  The lesson: whenever we find a disconnect between the clear word of scripture and the grace of God revealed in Jesus; we go with Jesus.  Every time.  All the way.