‘Necessity Defense’ Used at Trial Over Building Blockade : Protests: The 21 activists claim that breaking the law was necessary to prevent greater harm as they attack U.S. policy in El Salvador.

In a nondescript courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, where a federal magistrate generally handles such routine matters as parking violations and public intoxication, a collection of civic activists instead spent Thursday talking foreign affairs in an attempt to put U.S. policy toward El Salvador on trial.

And, in what their lawyer described as an “extremely rare” legal maneuver, U.S. Magistrate Charles F. Eick permitted them to do it.

The 21 activists--all members of the Wednesday Morning Coalition, a group that each Wednesday establishes a peaceful blockade at the doors of the downtown Federal Building--were among more than 200 who were arrested in January and charged with blocking access to a government building, a petty offense under federal law.

Like many of their compatriots, they could have chosen to plead guilty, pay a fine, do community service, or perhaps spend a night or two in jail for their act of civil disobedience.

Instead, they went to trial. And with Eick’s permission, they waged the unusual “necessity defense”--an argument in which they asserted, in part, that breaking the law was necessary to prevent more harm from coming to the people of El Salvador.

“I think this is very significant,” said lawyer Peter Schey, who specializes in human rights law and represented the group on a pro bono basis Thursday. “The right to put on this defense was the most important thing to them. . . . These defendants feel that, as a matter of principle, their conduct was not only lawful but, indeed, was compelled by international humanitarian law.”

Schey said that while the necessity defense is often raised by lawyers in civil disobedience cases, judges rarely permit its use.

And in an odd twist that, the attorney said, was just as unusual as Eick’s ruling, the prosecutor in the case conceded that U.S. support of the government in El Salvador had indeed placed that country’s citizens in danger.

“The government,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Jody Thayer, “does not contest that there is imminent harm to persons in El Salvador.”

By offering that concession, Thayer prevented the defense from calling an expert in international law who would have testified about military atrocities in El Salvador. And though she clearly was not speaking on behalf of the nation’s foreign policy-makers, the coalition took her stipulation as a great victory, nonetheless.

Declared filmmaker and coalition member Robin Doyno: “We have an obligation to prevent the U.S. crime that is going on in El Salvador. We can establish U.S. complicity in death squad activity there. We’ve brought into court bloodcurdling evidence that has previously made prosecutors go white when we have presented it.”

But because the trial was continued until May 2, they did not have an opportunity Thursday to display their gruesome poster-size photographs of the bodies of six Jesuit priests slain in November.

However, two Jesuit priests, both defendants, did testify.

“I think one would have to be from Mars not to recognize the 10-year pattern of brutality that our tax dollars have supported,” said one, Father William Davis. “These people (the slain priests) were killed by those in . . . uniforms we purchased. They were killed with bullets that came directly from our tax dollars.”

Eick, a bespectacled, serious man with a dry wit, listened patiently to the testimony, which will likely pick up when the trial resumes next month. But at the end of the day, as he sentenced a defendant who decided to enter a guilty plea, Eick shed some light on his feelings about the events that he had allowed to unfold.

“A courtroom,” the magistrate said, “is a very inappropriate and ineffective forum to debate the foreign policy of the United States government.

“Nothing is going to be accomplished by such proceedings and such debate.”