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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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