FC: Jim Bell update: Partial transcript online, Sierra Times report

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Excerpt from a Sierra Times report written by their correspondent, who was 
present at Bell's sentencing last Friday:

http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/aug/26/arex082601.htm
   After a flurry of motions to dismiss the case for reasons varying from
   judicial prejudice to fraud by the court were denied, Bell's attorney
   Robert Leen addressed the pre-sentencing report. A normal practice in
   federal trials and many state criminal trials, the pre-sentencing
   report recommends a sentence depending on a number of factors. A
   defendant is assigned a "level" based on the crime and this level is
   adjusted upward if other factors are present. Leen argued that the
   factors that were applied were inappropriate or not present.

   Two of the factors might be of specific interest to Sierra Times
   readers. Using internet search engines to find the addresses of
   federal agents was considered a "special skill" which the majority of
   people don't reasonably possess. Although Leen pointed out that even
   his five-year-old could access a search engine and this was hardly
   demonstrative of a special skill, this argument was lost on the judge
   who had previously demonstrated an almost total lack of knowledge in
   the area during the trial.

   The other factor was that Bell showed no remorse over
   authoring Assassination Politics. Several times both the prosecutor
   and judge mentioned, in a style redolent of Soviet courts, that Bell
   hadn't" recanted" his essay, and therefore needed to be imprisoned
   "for the safety of the public."

The Assistant U.S. Attorney, Robb London, repeatedly stressed during the 
trial that Bell had not retracted or recanted his "Assassination Politics" 
essay (Bell characterized this as a thoughtcrime prosecution).

See:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42860,00.html
> "It's still on the Internet today," London said during the second day of 
> the trial in federal district court. "He has not retracted it."

John Young has posted the first two days of Bell's tesimony:
http://cryptome.org/jdb040601.htm
http://cryptome.org/jdb040901-2.htm

Background on U.S. v. Jim Bell:
http://www.cluebot.com/search.pl?topic=ap-politics

-Declan




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