Posted on 01/10/2018 10:06:06 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
On Sept. 23, 2016, a group of protesters blocked a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train carrying coal in Spokane, WA, to prevent the earth from warming up. From a scientific standpoint, the action was absurd.
As a piece of a political theater, it may have been more effective. The blockage by Rev. George Taylor and other members of groups called Veterans for Peace and Raging Grannies garnered widespread press coverage.
And the protest may trigger a legal revolution as well. In a hearing tomorrow, a judge in Spokane is expected to hand down a written ruling allowing Taylor to argue he had no choice but to stop the train.
Judge Debra Hayes has already indicated she’ll allow Taylor, a Lutheran pastor, to present the so-called “necessity defense” to defeat state charges of criminal trespass. Her formal order would clear the way him to bring in NASA scientists and other climate experts to try to convince a jury he had no reasonable alternative to halt human-induced global warming.
The Spokane trial is one example of how activists are retooling the centuries-old necessity defense to justify increasingly aggressive protests designed not just to raise awareness of the risks of burning fossil fuels, but to prevent their movement across the country. An old doctrine, the necessity defense allows defendants to argue they broke the law to prevent a greater harm from occurring, like the captain who ordered a customer’s cargo thrown overboard to prevent his or her ship from sinking.
“In some ways it fits very well with climate change," said Kelsey Skaggs, a Harvard-trained lawyer and executive director of the Climate Defense Project, "If climate change is not that, nothing is."
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
What happened to good railroad security?
Any volunteers to lie on the tarmac in front of Al Gore’s plane? :-)
The railroad needs to hire this guy.
Is this similar to the Chewbacca defense?
i had to shoot him to prevent his offspring from overpopulating the earth and causing more co2 into the atmosphere.
two can play at crazy
That argument works both ways... they’re truly trying to start an armed conflict.
My hero.
Rev. George Taylor, Visitation Pastor, All Saints Lutheran Church, ELCA!!!!
http://allsaintsgather.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/April-2016.pdf
Of course he’s ELCA (ultra-liberal, “gay”-”welcoming”)!!!
PHOOEY!!!!
They need a convoy of them.
“If they want eternal war, well and good; we accept the issue, and will dispossess them and put our friends in their place. I know thousands and millions of good people who at simple notice would come to accept the elegant houses and plantations there.”
“That argument works both ways.”
No. It doesn’t. It only ever works the Left’s way. Your mistake is that you’re applying logic to the illogical. In a logical world, it would work both ways. We are not living in a logical world.
That thought was running through my head as I typed it... but the moral imperative is the same regardless of the law. Your point is that the law will prosecute the conservative and I get that... but at some point we have to count the cost. When good men stand by and do nothing....
A rotary plow on the front of the locomotive would have solved the problem.
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