As the trial of Scott Roeder, charged with murdering Dr. George Tiller in church last year, wraps up, the defendant made an extraordinary confession on the witness stand: “I shot him,” Roeder admitted, after declaring “I did what I thought was needed to be done to protect the children.”
Roeder’s lawyers are aiming to have their client convicted not of the first-degree murder he has confessed to planning and executing, but of a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. They claim he had the legal requisite of “an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force.”
Should they advance this argument, it could open the door for all kinds of religious beliefs justifying violent action. Roeder’s anti-abortion views do not exist in a vacuum; he also admitted on the witness stand that they were shaped by his religious beliefs. From the New York Times:
Mr. Roeder, 51, of Kansas City, Mo., told jurors that he had a growing sense of his own faith and opposition to abortion in the 1990s after watching “The 700 Club,” the evangelist Pat Robertson‘s television talk show. Mr. Roeder’s views on religion and abortion, he said, went “hand in hand.”
The National Abortion Federation and American Civil Liberties Union have filed an amicus brief in the case, opposing Roeder’s possible use of the argument to support the lesser charge. “This is a dangerous misinterpretation of the law,” Doug Bonney, Chief Counsel & Legal Director, ACLU of Kansas & Western Missouri, said in a statement. “No matter what our political or moral beliefs, we are not entitled to kill those who disagree with us. We would not allow someone who murders a general to get a lesser sentence because the murder was motivated by a belief that war is unjustifiable.”
UPDATE: The jury just convicted Roeder of first-degree murder of Tiller.
