Verdict Against Metzger

So the despicable Tom Metzger must pay $5 million for allegedly inciting some skinheads to violence in the murder of a black man in Portland, Ore. (Part A, Oct. 23). Recently, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates suggested that casual drug users should “be taken out and shot.” Does this mean that if, by the same token, someone shot a casual drug user, Gates would be held liable?

The legal idea of agency, where a person may be sued simply for incitement, will have a depressing effect on the expression of unpopular ideas, which are, after all, what the First Amendment was designed to protect. The judge in the White Aryan Resistance case ruled that the First Amendment “protects the person’s right to advocate the abstract need for violence sometime in the indefinite future. But it does not allow a person to prepare a group for violent action and spur it on to such action in the immediate or near future.” This is unconscionably fuzzy reasoning. How long is the immediate or near or the indefinite future?

The issue is not incitement. It is homicide. The gulf between ideas and physical actions is infinite. The responsibility for this terrible crime lies solely in the hands of those who voluntarily swung the bat which killed Mulugeta Seraw. They were the ones who made the decision to kill, and were justly convicted for it.

BARRY S. REIN, Pasadena