>Sherman is a young working class activist who doesn't have access to nice liberal things like radical lawyers. One of the frustrating things about doing support for Sherman is the stupid things he did in the early stages of this case. The authorities did some heavy duty leaning on Sherman, which successfully scared him into pleading guilty to stuff that isn't a crime. He's basically been found guilty of distributing information that can be found in any public library.
Not really. It is the intent that the information be used in the commission of crimes of violence that makes it a serious offense, not the distribution. And he hardly needs a lawyer to tell him whether he's guilty of that or not. He must have had some idea what his intentions were and he's the only one that can really be certain of his intentions.
In fact, its hard to imagine how a prosecution could have been successful WITHOUT a guilty plea or confession of some kind.
There was a similar sort of case in Melbourne a few years back that attracted a lot of notoriety, the editors of a university magazine published an article setting out in detail some of the tricks of the shoplifting craft, called 'The Art of Shoplifting'. Most people will have seen it around the traps. The publication was censored on the basis that it was an incitement to crime, the editors appealed, but the federal court upheld the ban on publication. However the court included the full text of the banned article in its written decision, thus affording the shoplifting even wider distribution and legal privilege.
http://libertus.net/censor/odocs/rarab9808.html
The students faced up to six years jail for publishing the banned article, but eventually in 1999 the prosecution was dropped. No explanation was given, but it would have been ironic if the students had been jailed for publishing an article which could be purchased from the Federal Court Registry, or downloaded from the internet where the court decision had also been published.
The main issue of course is to distinguish between what is incitement and what is political expression. I imagine Sherman's web site was in the same vein as the shoplifting article, that is to say the bomb making instructions were merely a graphic device to illustrate a point. It is no more a serious incitement to terrorist bombing than that old list of recipes for cooking capitalist 'Eat The Rich' is an incitement to cannibalism.
But, unfortunately, the Established Order don't seem to be able to tell a spoof when they see one. So what's with all this endless jabber I keep reading about 'the left' having no sense of humour. It isn't that we don't have a sense of humour, its just that some people don't get the joke. Mind you, people who get threatened with long jail sentences for what is essentially an off-colour joke, could be forgiven for losing their sense of humour.
Bill Tartlett Bracknell Tas