San Diego

A San Diego Superior Court judge has dismissed a countersuit filed by white separatist Tom Metzger against a national civil rights activist, ruling that there was no legal basis to hear the case in the local courts.

Judge Phillip Sharp ruled Wednesday that the San Diego county courts have no jurisdiction over activist Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., said Jim McElroy, a San Diego attorney representing Dees.

Metzger, a Fallbrook television repairman and founder of the White Aryan Resistance, had filed the countersuit in January against Dees and Engedaw Berhanu, the uncle of a black man who was fatally beaten with baseball bats by a group of skinheads in Portland, Ore.

The San Diego suit was prompted by a $10-million federal lawsuit Dees and Berhanu filed last October in Portland against Metzger and his son, John, accusing them of encouraging and inciting the skinheads in the death of Berhanu’s nephew, Mulugeta Seraw. That case is progressing toward a trial this year, McElroy said Thursday.

In the San Diego countersuit, Tom Metzger charged Dees with malicious prosecution. At a hearing Wednesday, Metzger, who represented himself, argued that, because Dees does business in California, he is subject to local court jurisdiction.

But McElroy successfully argued that, since the lawsuit against Metzger was filed in Oregon and Dees does not conduct business in this state, a California court has no authority in the case.