Court Shooting--Crime Victims Worried : Father’s Act Was Understandable but Let the Law Prevail, Some Say

Jack Spiegelman always stood out among his closest friends, the other parents who banded together hoping to make certain that justice was done to the murderers of their children.

They all decried what they saw as a lenient court system and lobbied for laws they thought would make it tougher. But Spiegelman went further, writing a broadside so strident against Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird that other people in his crime victims’ group, Justice for Homicide Victims, chastised him for it.

And many of his friends would admit to entertaining thoughts of taking personal revenge on those responsible for the crimes against their children. Last Thursday in a Hall of Justice courtroom here, Spiegelman apparently did just that, drawing a .38-caliber revolver from a briefcase and shooting Daniel D. Morgan, who is facing trial for the murder of Spiegelman’s teen-age daughter.

Morgan, hit by three bullets, was hospitalized but is expected to recover. Spiegelman, who surrendered to a bailiff immediately after the gunfire, was charged with attempted murder, then freed on $25,000 bail.

While the events of last Thursday are dramatic enough in themselves--the movie “Death Wish” seemingly come to life--the shooting also is likely to reverberate beyond the San Francisco courthouse. On Friday, scores of people who had never heard of Jack Spiegelman were calling a San Francisco radio station to applaud his act, and many offered money for his defense. And the shooting rekindled questions over the increasingly political crime victims’ movement.

Spiegelman retreated to a Bay Area home to spend the weekend with his ex-wife and parents. Reached Saturday, he turned down requests for an interview, calmly saying that he has been “under a lot of stress” and wanted to “hibernate for the weekend.”

Feeling of Unfairness

However, Spiegelman did speak with The Times last year for an article about the expanding crime victims’ movement. Even then it was clear that the 47-year-old father of Sarah Spiegelman could not overcome the overwhelming feeling of unfairness that while his daughter was dead, the man accused of killing her was alive. And he was driven to do something about it.

As Spiegelman told it, he had been “as apolitical as you could get” before Sarah was shot to death in March, 1983, as she sat with a friend near the Rose Garden at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. He said he had never even voted or given any consideration to whether he favored capital punishment.

He said last year that immediately after the murder, he withdrew into “a shell,” and in an effort to “do something for her,” he quit drinking.

But in October, 1983, seven months after his daughter’s murder, he picked up a newspaper and read that Archie Fain was being paroled from prison after serving 17 years for murdering a 17-year-old boy and raping three girls near Oakdale. Fain had been on Death Row for the 1967 crimes, but his sentence was reduced to life, along with the sentences of more than 100 other Death Row inmates, when the California Supreme Court in 1972 overturned capital punishment.

“It was something I never would have read before,” Spiegelman said of the Fain article. “My blood started to boil.” The thought that a killer--perhaps someday his daughter’s killer--could go free made him realize that “I had to do something,” he said.

What Spiegelman did was join the burgeoning crime victims’ movement. The movement blossomed in the 1970s in an effort to provide counseling and mutual support to victims of crime and their families. By 1983, however, it was beginning to take a new direction, as crime victims’ organizations became increasingly active on the political front.

The group ultimately chosen by Spiegelman was just such an organization. The leaders of Justice for Homicide Victims had splintered from another group, Parents of Murdered Children, because they wanted to be more politically active.

Justice for Homicide Victims was founded by Ellen Dunne, the Beverly Hills mother of Dominique Dunne, an actress who was killed by her ex-boyfriend, and now claims nearly 700 members.

Spiegelman, once a copywriter for a Manhattan advertising agency, quickly made himself useful by helping write the group’s brochures, as well as letters to politicians and others in support of various pieces of legislation.

Theme of Vengeance

Occasionally, he turned to the theme of vengeance in his writing. In one brochure, he reviewed a television movie about two fathers who wanted to capture and bring to justice the murderers of their children. He panned it as “Hollywood at its worst,” and wrote: “This is the way it really works.

“When your kid is murdered your reaction is the same--whether you are a simple working stiff or a corporate hotshot with his own jet. That reaction is you want the murderer’s life. It has nothing to do with revenge. It’s called justice.”

He mentioned these feelings in The Times interview. Explaining how his daughter’s murder changed his outlook, Spiegelman recalled a television news report of a Louisiana father who shot a man accused of attacking his child.

The sight, Spiegelman said, made him feel “great.” He realized that the father would not have to go through the pain of a trial, he said. Spiegelman did not, however, remember the incident quite right. The crime was kidnaping. Spiegelman thought it was murder. Spiegelman thought the child was a daughter. Instead, the victim was a 12-year-old son.

Spiegelman wrote some of the most strident literature produced by the movement. One of those writings stirred controversy at a crime victims’ conference sponsored by Gov. George Deukmejian’s Office of Criminal Justice Planning last year.

An ‘Open Letter’

In an “open letter” to Bird, Spiegelman called on her to picture a loved one on the ground, a bullet in his or her head.

“So you have your idea about justice and I have mine. And the real difference between us is this: my mind can never be changed. . . .

“But your mind can be changed.

“It can be changed in an instant.

“All it takes is a single bullet.”

John Davies, lobbyist for the state Judicial Council, which Bird chairs, complained to Deukmejian Administration officials about the broadside, prompting the governor’s spokesman to disavow the letter.

The incident prompted criticism of Spiegelman within his own organization.

In the wake of Thursday’s shooting, Spiegelman’s colleagues in the movement expressed fear that he had done them deeper damage.

Robert W. Leach, a Malibu resident who is a member of Justice for Homicide Victims, said that Spiegelman always has seemed to have a “deep rage.”

“We are all diminished by this kind of thing. Our society, as imperfect as it is, becomes a little less perfect when this happens,” Leach said.

Desire for Revenge

Many parents of murdered children acknowledge that they have had similar desires to lash out at the accused or convicted murderers of their children. They say they control their desire for revenge through their religious beliefs, or by getting involved in efforts to make laws tougher, or by counseling other victims.

“We all feel that anger but we temper it. One thing that stops us is that other people need us. It’s not that we don’t have the same impulses,” said Colleen Davis, active in Parents of Murdered Children chapter in Whittier.

Davis said her involvement in the support group, plus her involvement in other political activity, is a “channeling of the anger.” She added that her actions are based “on whether or not it would detract from my son’s memory.

“My son’s memory would not be honored by having me in jail,” Davis said.

Dunne said: “I pray people will not take it (the shooting) to heart and think we are a bunch of loonies. . . . We are really sensible people. . . . We work through the law.”

But some critics of the crime victims’ movement contend that its more strident elements invite actions such as Spiegelman’s. Law professor Lynn Henderson, scholar in residence at Stanford University and author of an article on the movement in the Stanford Law Review last year, said that some of the rhetoric written on behalf of the victims’ movement “can legitimize a sort of vigilantism.”

“It invites people with that attitude to take that action,” Henderson said last week.

Moved to Los Angeles

Spiegelman moved to Los Angeles to seek a slower life style than the one he had in New York. He had given up advertising to become a cabinetmaker. He is divorced, and his daughter Sarah was living with Spiegelman’s former wife in the Bay Area when she was killed. Once his daughter died, it left an unyielding void. He might go to a party or movie and laugh. But he said he never truly had fun, because he could never stop thinking about his daughter.

“Sarah was his pride and his joy,” said Spiegelman’s father, Phil, 76, who suffered a mild heart attack on Thursday after hearing that his son had shot Morgan. “For three years he has been morose. . . .

“He wouldn’t hurt a fly. His mind must have just snapped.”

The father said Spiegelman was frustrated that the prosecution of Morgan, the accused murderer of Sarah Spiegelman, had been delayed by Morgan’s mental illness. Morgan has been in and out of mental institutions for the last 20 years, and continues to hallucinate and hear voices, Morgan’s lawyers say.

Jack Spiegelman was skeptical.

“He is a certified nut, but he wasn’t crazy enough to escape,” Spiegelman said last year, noting that Morgan eluded arrest for several weeks after the murder.

The San Francisco district attorney’s office renewed its prosecution of Morgan last fall, believing that a jury should decide whether Morgan is not guilty because of insanity, Deputy Dist. Atty. Tom Norman said. Morgan could be sentenced to death if he is convicted and found to be sane.

Spiegelman attended much of Morgan’s preliminary hearing last November, often with Sarah’s grandmother. But Spiegelman did not stop by his parents’ home last week when he came to San Francisco, apparently to hear lawyers argue pretrial motions in Morgan’s case.

“We didn’t know he was in town,” Phil Spiegelman said.