Doctor's Killer Called Terrorist, Saint

[Rob-TheStormChaser]

The man who shot and killed abortion doctor Barnett Slepian five years ago is a religious terrorist, prosecutors said, a zealot who stalked his prey with the dispassion of an experienced hunter.

Today, they portrayed James Charles Kopp as a man so convinced of his own purity that even killing the doctor in front of his children seemed an act of saintliness.

"I equate this to an act of religious terror," Erie County assistant district attorney Joseph Marusak said in an unusual one-day trial without a jury today. "Whether [they] shoot to kill for Christ or Allah . . . who are these people? They are religious zealots."

It was a curious day of trial. Kopp, 49, sat at his table with the mien of an absent-minded professor, swimming in a suit several sizes too large, smiling at his supporters in the courtroom. There is no suspense about whether prosecutors have proved that Kopp pulled the trigger.

Kopp already has admitted in an interview with the Buffalo News that on Oct. 23, 1998, he stood in a dark stand of woods outside Slepian's suburban house and lined up the doctor in the sights of his Russian-made assault rifle. Kopp fired a single armor-plated bullet, which tore through Slepian's back and lungs and severed his spinal cord.

Within moments, the 51-year-old doctor bled to death on the kitchen floor, as his wife and four children tried to stanch his wounds.

Many had expected Kopp to try and turn his jury trial into a forum for his antiabortion views. But two weeks ago Kopp requested and was granted a non-jury trial, fearing that his views would be lost in a barrage of prosecution witnesses. Neither Kopp nor prosecution witnesses were allowed to testify. Judge Michael L. D'Amico said he expects to have a verdict by Tuesday afternoon.

Kopp agreed to stipulate that his jailhouse interview in November with the Buffalo News was entirely accurate. In that interview, Kopp declined to rule out shooting more doctors if he is freed.

Kopp's lawyer, Bruce A. Barket, portrayed his client as a religious man, not unlike Christian martyrs who sacrifice themselves for others.

"Jim wanted to save the children that Slepian was going to kill," Barket said. "He acted in defense of children who were scheduled to be aborted."

Kopp, in Barket's words, walked a path that took him from a peace-loving antiabortion activist to a grassroots founder of Operation Rescue to a man who became convinced that violence was the answer.

"Jim did not just wake up one day and decided he should start shooting abortion doctors," Barket said. "He was a Christian."

If so, prosecutors said, then Kopp was a Christian who had learned to rationalize a particularly ugly form of violence. Evidence shows that Kopp began taking target practice in earnest as early as 1993. Later he traveled to Tennessee and purchased his assault rifle using an assumed name and fake papers.

It's not clear when, exactly, Kopp appeared in Buffalo. But according to prosecutors he spent many weeks scouting various abortion doctors. He pretended to take jogs in their neighborhoods and tracked their movements. When he picked Slepian as the likely target, Kopp apparently spent hours in the woods, checking sight lines and secreting his rifle in a carefully prepared hole.

It's not known how many people helped Kopp, although witnesses report that Kopp, after shooting Slepian, hopped into the passenger side of an automobile. Another woman helped drive him to Mexico. From there, he fled to Ireland and then to France, where the police eventually caught him.

Kopp has insisted that most of his friends in the antiabortion movement did not know of his violent plans. The prosecutor alluded to much the same today.

"He projected himself as meek and mild-mannered," Marusak said. "He kept intensely private his burning intent to kill abortion doctors."

Kopp's defense, in the end, amounts to the argument that he intended only to wound, not slay, Slepian. Barket argued that his client had aimed for Slepian's shoulder, and that only an unlucky ricochet sent the bullet through the doctor's upper body.

"It's not depraved indifference to shoot to wound," Barket said.

But the prosecutors noted that an assault rifle is a weapon of war, and that in war the object is to kill. And they recalled that Kopp, in his jailhouse interview, had spoken of not being able to take a second shot because Slepian already had fallen to the floor.

"You shoot someone with that kind of a bullet and quite frankly you are going to kill them," Marusak said.

Kopp listened to arguments on both sides with the quiet intent of an attentive graduate student. As the prosecutor excoriated him, he tapped his fingers. During breaks, he smiled at friends in the courtroom, and once or twice toward Lynne Slepian, the doctor's widow.

She never returned his glance.

Kopp's supporters numbered only five, but they were resolute defenders of his violent acts. The Rev. Michael Bray of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Bowie sat in the front row and nodded encouragingly to Kopp.

"Jim Kopp killed a murderer," Bray said afterward. "That's the truth that I can't condemn."

A few feet away, Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, listened. Her organization tracks violence against abortion clinics and doctors, and has charted a downward trend in homicides and bombings the past few years.

But she noted a pattern: "When a conviction occurs, there usually is another murder in a very short period of time," she said. "There's always another recruit."

[JQ Public]

Just as much of a terrorist than Osama. Causing a disruption of normal day-to-day life.