By David Chesanow, JTNews Correspondent
The civil disorder bill initiated by the Anti-Defamation League has passed both houses of the state Legislature and was signed by the governor on Wednesday, April 3.
“It is important that extremists be deterred and punished. Engrossed Substitute House Bill 2505 penalizes civil disorder training, and hopefully, will help avoid future tragedies,” the governor said Wednesday.
The bill signed by the governor had been amended by the Senate so that only teachers of violent tactics — not their trainees — can be charged with a felony. The change reflects senators’ concern that people assembling and practicing nonviolent civil disobedience could be held liable under the bill as originally written.
“The amendment that the Senate hung on it stripped away the part that made it illegal for people to gather in groups to be trained,” explained the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Al O’Brien (D-Mountlake Terrace). “What it kept in there…was a person is guilty of a crime if they instruct people in the use of a device or technique to do substantial bodily harm to a person or cause death to a person when they have knowledge or reasonably believe that it’s going to inflict harm in a civil disturbance,”
Brian David Goldberg, the ADL’s executive director for the Pacific Northwest, noted that nowadays lawmakers are especially wary of legislation that may be used as a pretense to intrude on civil liberties. “We started working on this bill well before Sept. 11 happened,” he pointed out. “I think that after Sept. 11, some of the legislation we saw coming down from the federal level put a lot of legislators’ backs up against the wall in terms of being very, very cautious about any bill that deals with issues of training and civil liberties and so forth.”
Goldberg had hoped that the new law would cover trainees in violence. “I think we got two thirds of what we set out to accomplish when we drafted this legislation based on the ADL’s model,” he said. “Clearly we wanted to go after not only those people that were training but those that participated in the training. So clearly there is a diminishing impact of the bill… But it still creates a felony category that does not exist for those that are the trainers.”
In addition, Goldberg noted that the new law provides a definition for the term civil disorder, which state law had previously lacked: “That’s one thing which we had to get in order to address this issue.”
Although a companion bill died in the Senate, Engrossed Substitute House Bill 2505 was passed by the House, 97–0, amended in the Senate, then sent back to the House for a final vote. The House again passed the bill unanimously on March 11.
The new law makes it a felony to train a person in the use of a tactic or device “capable of causing significant bodily injury or death to persons” in the furtherance of a civil disorder, which the law defines as “any public disturbance involving acts of violence that is intended to cause an immediate danger of, or to result in, significant injury to the person of any other individual.”
The Senate amended the House legislation so that a bodily injury must be “significant” to be prosecutable; the Senate also deleted the passage referring to people assembling for purposes of receiving instruction in the use of dangerous devices or techniques. Therefore, a scuffle resulting in a minor injury cannot be construed as an act of violent civil disorder, nor can people exercising their right to assemble be charged with a felony for, say, listening to someone describe how to build a bomb.
Sen. Adam Kline (D-southeast Seattle), who had sponsored the Senate’s ill-fated companion bill to HB 2505, maintains that the original legislation paid sufficient heed to civil liberties: “The point was to avoid in any way endangering the right of assembly, the right of people to get together and have rallies or marches for any kind of political purpose…and also to avoid infringing on the right of free speech, alone or with a group.
“Because this area of violence is sometimes attached to political passions, we have to be very careful here,” Kline said. “It’s not the political but rather the violent that we have to aim at, and I believe the [original] bill did that.”
But Sherry Appleton, a lobbyist for both The Defender Association and the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, maintained that while the intent behind a piece of legislation may be clear to everyone at the time it is drafted, there is a danger later on that people “will look at the statute and say, ‘Oh, well, we can apply it to this group or that group.’ So that was the problem: The way it was written was not narrow enough.”
Appleton is also a lobbyist for the Coalition for a Jewish Voice, which supported the legislation. Because she represents organizations with conflicting positions on HB 2505, she declined to lobby for either side while the bill was proceeding through legislative channels.
However, Remy Trupin, lobbyist for the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, assisted the ADL by helping to find coalition partners for the bills and shepherding them through the legislature. The reference to groups gathering to receive instruction, he said, “raises the fear that we’re trying to restrict and limit the free assembly of people, and that’s not the practical effect of what we do…. It was a completely valid concern; I don’t think [legislators] spent the time talking to us to understand where we were coming from, but I understand their concern.”
Oregon and Idaho already have laws to prosecute participants in training for the purpose of causing violent civil disturbances. At the House Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee hearing in February, ADL board members Diane Baer and Rebecca Jacobs testified in support of the legislation. Baer suggested that extremists will use Washington state as a training ground if is no law to arrest and prosecute them.
Jacobs informed the committee of the 1993 plan by Aryan Nations members from eastern Washington and Idaho to attack the Tacoma headquarters of the NAACP. The extremists were intercepted en route to their target. However, had a civil disorder law been in place, arrests could have been made while the plot was still in its planning stage.