Two White Separatists Acquitted of Murder : Courts: Deputy U.S. marshal’s death led to Idaho siege. One defendant was found guilty on lesser charges.

After the longest criminal-trial deliberations in Idaho history, a federal jury in Boise, Ida., on Thursday acquitted two white separatists in the slaying of a deputy U.S. marshal during a shootout that triggered a bloody siege of their remote mountaintop cabin.

Randall Weaver, 45, and Kevin Harris, 25, were charged with murder, conspiracy and lesser charges in connection with the shooting death of William Degan near the Idaho Panhandle cabin on Aug. 21, 1992.

But after 20 days of deliberations, the eight-woman, four-man jury convicted Weaver only of failure to appear in court on a weapons charge and of violating bail conditions while on release pending that trial.

Harris was acquitted on all counts.

The case had become a lightning rod for right-wing extremists who maintained that the defendants were being persecuted by the federal government because of their beliefs--a blend of white separatism and Old Testament values.

But some law enforcement experts said the case also calls into question the tactics and philosophy of federal agents who shadow fringe groups with a penchant for amassing private arsenals.

“I see the formation of a curious crusading mentality among certain law enforcement agencies to stamp out what they see as a threat to government generally,” said Tony Cooper, a law enforcement consultant who teaches terrorism, negotiation and conflict resolution at the University of Texas at Dallas.

“It’s an exaggerated concern that they are facing a nationwide conspiracy and that somehow this will get out of control unless it is stamped out at a very early stage,” Cooper said. “These acquittals send a message that representatives of authority may not only have exceeded their mandate but have carried out their mission in an irresponsible way.”

In Washington, U.S. Marshals Service Director Henry E. Hudson steadfastly supported the officials involved in the case saying that “their actions were appropriate.”

The trial hinged on who fired first when gunfire erupted while Degan and two other marshals--all wearing ski masks and camouflage and armed with automatic weapons equipped with silencers--were spying on Weaver, who had failed to show up in court on a weapons charge 18 months earlier.

Weaver’s son, Sammy, 14, was also killed in the shootout, which spurred an 11-day siege of the plywood cabin. The next day, an FBI sniper shot and killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki, 43, while she stood in the cabin doorway cradling her baby daughter.

Throughout the eight-week trial, federal prosecutors portrayed Weaver and Harris as political and religious zealots who had prophesied, and then sought to create, a holy war with federal agents.

In closing arguments, Assistant U.S. Atty. Kim Lindquist said Weaver, his wife and Harris were obsessed with the notion that the federal government was bent on persecuting them for their beliefs, which led them to “push the perimeters of reasonableness and common sense.”

“This is a case of resolve on the part of Weaver and Harris to defy laws to the point of using violence,” Lindquist said. “This whole thing is a tragedy. . . . The cause was the resolve of the Weaver family, and that translates into murder.”

Weaver’s attorney, renowned Wyoming trial lawyer Gerry Spence, argued that Degan was killed in self-defense when he and the other marshals fired the first rounds and provoked the shootout.

Spence also accused prosecutors of trying to “demonize” his client “so that they could cover up the murder of a boy shot in the back and a woman shot in the head.”

Spence and Harris’ attorney, David Nevin, were so confident that the prosecution had failed to present sufficient evidence for conviction that they rested their case without calling any witnesses.

The prosecution’s case was hobbled by numerous blunders, including missing and mishandled evidence.

The jurors learned that a spent round of ammunition collected by FBI investigators near Weaver’s cabin was removed from the scene, photographed, returned to the site and then presented as untainted evidence.

At another point, U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge fined federal prosecutors $3,200--the equivalent of a day’s collective pay--for delays in providing crucial evidence to defense attorneys.

In an interview, U.S. Atty. Maurice Ellsworth would only say that the case was a hard one to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Obviously the length of the deliberations would indicate it was an extra-inning game, and we came up one run short,” Ellsworth said. “But I don’t think we got shut out.”

The deliberations were prolonged by the complexity of the case, inconsistent testimony from some of the government’s 56 witnesses and the sudden illness of jury foreman Cyril Hatfield.

Hatfield, a Boise salesman, was hospitalized 11 days into deliberations for stress, exhaustion and possible heart problems.

He was replaced by an alternate juror who had been kept separate from the sequestered jury during the first 100 hours it spent debating the evidence.

“The government didn’t make their case,” new foreman John Harris Weaver, no relation to the defendant, told reporters after the verdicts were returned. “We kind of put ourselves on trial. If we were on trial, would we want to be convicted on this kind of evidence?”

Outside the courthouse, Spence said: “We are vindicated.”

“It proves again that a jury, if it has all the facts, can do justice in this country,” he said. “It’s a hard, hard road, as you can see, but it was done here.”

Spence said Weaver leaned toward him after the verdicts were read and said: “I’ve learned something about the system. This is a good system. This system will work.”

Weaver remained in custody pending his Sept. 28 sentencing on the two charges for which he was found guilty. The maximum penalty is 15 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

Spence said he plans to ask the court to immediately release his client from custody based on the 10-months Weaver has served since his arrest last August.

Many observers saw parallels between the Idaho case and the government’s strategy during the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Tex., where more than 80 people died, many of them children.

Both incidents started when federal agents brought firearms charges against people with highly unorthodox religious beliefs, living self-contained in remote locations.

BACKGROUND Randy Weaver failed to appear in court in February, 1991, on charges of selling two sawed-off shotguns to a federal informant. Weaver barricaded his family inside their backwoods Idaho cabin for 18 months before U.S. marshals moved in to arrest him last Aug. 21. The resulting shootout killed Deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan, and Weaver’s son, Sammy. Weaver’s wife, Vicki, was slain the next day. After an 11-day siege by 200 law officers, Weaver and friend Kevin Harris, 25, both wounded, gave themselves up.