Vigilante Barnett pays again

(I am sorry to have been away from Blogger for the past two weeks. Time was so limited that I did not even get to Twitter for five days. But I've been back to daily tweets since February 1, and now here goes with my blog.)

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With the ceaseless flow of terrible news about these borderlands (and the much-less-mentioned constant deportations that tear families apart), great news has come from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision of a February 2009 federal jury was upheld by the court. Notorious "Minuteman" vigilante Roger Barnett will now have to pay $87,000 in damages for assaulting a group of 16 undocumented migrants -- five women and 11 men -- in 2004. He held the group captive and threatened them with his gun and his dog, telling them he would shoot anybody who tried to get away.

Barnett claimed he acted in self defense but even he said that nobody had threatened or attacked him.

This is the second conviction for Barnett. In 2008, the Arizona Court of Appeals upheld a November 2006 conviction for false imprisonment of a Hispanic family from Douglas (who happened to be US citizens.) He attacked them -- a family that included two little girls of 9 and 11 -- with racist language and threats that he would kill them with his gun. That court decision meant that Barnett had to pay $100,000 in damages.

The presiding judge in the 2009 trial was Judge John Roll, who was killed in the January 8 Safeway massacre that took the lives of six Tucsonans and wounded 13. A conservative judge highly respected for his fairness and patience, Roll was hounded with death threats during the case and had to have 24-hour police protection -- one more illustration for the rest of our country and the world of what is going on here in Arizona.




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