Free Will vs. Parents’ Wishes in Kidnap-Brainwash Trial

Gary Rempel has convicted murderers, rapists and other criminals, thugs and no-goods during his 18 years as a San Diego County prosecutor.

But when Rempel goes into court today, he’ll be trying to convict on kidnaping charges defendants of a decidedly different ilk: a soft-spoken 58-year-old couple--a woman who could almost pass as the kindly old Mrs. Wilson who coddles Dennis the Menace, and her husband, who would seem to be the antitheses of the crotchety old Mr. Wilson.

At issue is religious freedom vs. alleged brainwashing, and whether parents can kidnap an adult child if they believe it is for the child’s own good to remove him or her from dangerous surroundings.

The couple--Dorothy and Earle Brown--along with one of their daughters and two men, are charged with kidnaping, conspiracy and false imprisonment for forcibly taking their daughter from an Encinitas parking lot in May, 1988, in order, they say, to deprogram her. The Browns, who live in Santa Cruz, said they wanted their youngest daughter to quit her allegiance to a small, tight-knit organization based in Coronado called Great Among the Nations, which describes itself as a fundamental Christian Bible study group intent on establishing a television and videotape evangelism ministry.

The Browns claim that Ginger, a former UC San Diego music student, had been brainwashed by the group’s leader, Benjamin Altschul, and needed to be rescued for her own good from the group, which, they maintain, is a poorly disguised cult. The Browns and other critics claim the 17 group members have been insidiously persuaded by Altschul--a former book salesman--to financially support him with “love offerings” and tithing, allowing him to live in a Coronado condominium, drive a Mercedes-Benz and dress to the nines.

Ginger Brown, 23 at the time, was allegedly held against her will for five days in the Escondido area home of Hank Erler and was subjected to deprogramming efforts by Cliff Daniels, a Los Angeles man who says he is a former cult member who has deprogrammed about 200 persons in recent years. Ginger Brown fought his attempts and was released four days later on a Carlsbad street corner, free to return to Great Among the Nations. Photographs of Ginger Brown after the deprogramming attempt showed bruises and abrasions.

Through their attorneys, the five defendants say that forcibly taking Ginger Brown was, compared to letting her remain in the fold of Great Among the Nations, the lesser of two evils. That generic defense contention has led to the acquittal of deprogrammers in similar cases heard by other courts.

Herb Weston, one of the five defense attorneys, contends that Great Among the Nations was “another Jonestown waiting to happen,” a reference to the Jim Jones-led commune in Guyana where, in 1978, the charismatic leader and 912 of his followers died in a mass suicide.

But Vista Superior Court Judge David B. Moon, in a series of pre-trial motions last month, told the defense attorneys he would not allow the so-called “choice of evils,” or “necessity” defense to be used in the upcoming trial.

Moon said the defense failed to offer any facts substantiating their contention that Ginger Brown was in imminent danger because of her allegiance to the group, and therefore cannot argue that the parents were legally motivated to act as they did in trying to remove her from the group.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin today. Defense attorneys on Friday petitioned the 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego to delay the trial so they could challenge Moon’s pre-trial rulings. But the appellate court denied the request.

Banned from using the choice-of-evils defense, attorneys for the five co-defendants say they have little chance of persuading a jury that the Browns, their daughter, Erler and Daniels are innocent of kidnaping and false imprisonment. “Our defense has been gutted,” said Weston, who is representing Holly Brown, Ginger’s older sister. Defendant Daniels added: “It’s them, 10; us, 0--flat zero.”

Rempel says he is prosecuting the five as kidnapers, pure and simple, because there are no facts to suggest that Great Among the Nations is a cult.

“If you can’t use the word ‘criminal’ in the same sentence as ‘cult,’ then you shouldn’t be using the word ‘cult,’ ” said Rempel who, ironically, has prosecuted and won convictions against cult members in the past. In those cases, Rempel said, the cult members were charged with criminal activities, ranging from murder to sex crimes.

While acknowledging that he is “absolutely” sympathetic to the Browns--the very people he is trying to convict--Rempel said there is no indication that Ginger Brown was the victim of fraudulent inducement in joining the group, was physically mistreated, or was drugged or otherwise forcibly coerced to join the group. She was an adult using her free will, he maintains.

“There are millions of salespeople trying to talk people out of their money--and a lot of them believe what they’re selling,” Rempel said. “If you’re giving a large amount of your salary to a particular religion, and it turns out to be a fraud, then they can sue later.

“But we’re all entitled to be fools. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are guaranteed to us by the Constitution. If it makes someone happy to buy someone else a nice car, or to give money, or to study the Bible six hours a day, well, that’s part of our personal freedom.

“If a person is merely flim-flammed for money, there are alternatives open to those concerned about that person’s well-being.” They include offering financial advice to the more dramatic effort of having conservators named on behalf of the perceived victim.

“But in this case, we’re talking about an adult who made her own decision, and her parents took the ultimate sanction,” Rempel said. “And there are no provisions in the law for kidnaping.”

For his part, Altschul says he and his ministry have nothing for which to apologize.

“Definitely, we could look like a cult,” Altschul said in an interview with The Times earlier this year. “But, if you look at the church created by (the disciple) Paul, it looks like a cult, too--how they gathered, how they lived.

“I believe God has sent these sheep to me, and God drove me to them. We are drawn to each other. Teaching is my greatest gift, understanding of prophetic Scripture and the laying out of biblical text.”

He acknowledges that he is not a struggling minister. “I feel God has blessed me by these people who feel this is the way I should live,” he said at the time.

And Altschul says the controversy involving the Brown incident has served to promote his ministry. Both he and Ginger Brown have made numerous television appearances around the country, on news programs and religious-oriented cable programming.

Last week, Earle Brown, whose planned defense was stung by Moon’s rulings, asked permission to replace his attorney, Saul Wright, because Wright failed to establish the foundation during the preliminary hearing that Ginger Brown was in imminent danger. The father wanted another attorney, Ford Greene--who has successfully defended other clients accused of kidnaping cult members--to represent him instead.

But Moon ruled Thursday that it was too late for Brown to switch attorneys, and Wright--who conceded during unusual, open courtroom testimony that he felt he no longer had his client’s confidence--was nonetheless ordered to continue representing Brown for the trial.

Greene said that, had he been Brown’s attorney since the outset of the case, he would have tried to show, by interviewing former members of Great Among the Nations, that Altschul “insidiously gained control over his followers, and exploited them. You can brainwash without using force. And you can show that to a court not by putting the group’s beliefs on trial (which is unconstitutional), but by showing . . . the rape of a person’s mind, the engineering of a person’s soul.”

To that end, the defense attorneys had tried--but were refused by Moon--to have a psychologist examine Ginger Brown, hoping to show she had lost her free will under Altschul.

But Rempel says brainwashing isn’t the issue.

“If Ginger Brown believes her religious leader is a prophet of God and she should obey him, how may . . . mental health experts disprove her beliefs?” Rempel asked rhetorically in one court argument.

In another, he said:

“In every generation, parents have viewed their children’s religious and political beliefs with acute distress if those beliefs differed from their own. Under the First Amendment, however, adults in our society enjoy freedom of association and belief. It is unwise, in our view, to tamper with those freedoms and established precedent . . . out of sympathy for parents seeking to ‘rescue’ their misguided offspring, however well-intentioned and loving their acts may be.”

Rempel contended that the use of the word “brainwashing” has no role in this particular case. “One man’s fervent religion may appear a cult to another man, equally fervent in a different religion,” he wrote in one pre-trial argument. “Are there two kinds of brains--washed and unwashed? How may the court know which is which?” The term, he said, “makes no differentiation between physically forced coercive techniques and salesmanship. It makes no distinction between stuporous automatons and persons who decide to believe what the persuader is suggesting.”

The Browns have said they wanted their daughter freed from the group because her personality had dramatically changed during her association with the group, including having become distant and cold toward her family.

But Rempel said some religions may foster traits that seem unusual to others, including “celibacy of ministers, wearing of unusual clothing by clerics, or separation of certain persons to remote locations where they study religious works and renounce worldly possessions including personal wealth.”

Simply put, Rempel said, there has been no offer of evidence that Ginger Brown has lost her free will, and her parents, no matter how chagrined they may be by their daughter’s life style, have no legal right to limit the 24-year-old’s pursuit of religion, no matter how foreign it might seem to them.

Attorney Weston said he will still try to get “all the facts before the jury as best we can,” within the limits of Moon’s rulings. “He’s made my job a lot more difficult, and we’ve been spending the past two weeks studying how we can re-do our defense.

“The Browns absolutely believed their daughter was going to be leaving the country with the group, and she was in danger,” Weston said. “So when do you step in to help her? Now her parents are being charged with the same crime as a terrorist who has a gun and kidnaps an airplane.”