NYT,pg1:Rudolph Offers Guilty Pleas, Defiance(anti-abortion, antigay rant)

[DeepModem Mom]

Bomber Offers Guilty Pleas, and Defiance
By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: April 14, 2005


ATLANTA, April 13 - Declaring himself "bloodied but emphatically unbowed," Eric Robert Rudolph on Wednesday issued his first public explanation for a series of abortion clinic bombings and an attack at the 1996 Olympics, gloating that his plea deal with prosecutors "deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death."

In the 11-page statement, devoid of remorse but rife with anti-abortion and antigay language, Mr. Rudolph said he had originally intended to bomb the Olympics every day to "confound, anger and embarrass" the government for legalizing abortion, but was foiled by his own poor planning.

He described watching federal agents who hunted for him in the North Carolina woods during his five years as a fugitive, and disputed a popular theory that he was influenced by an extremist Christian sect based on racial purity.

The statement was released after Mr. Rudolph pleaded guilty to four bombings: the Olympic attack here in the summer of 1996, attacks on an abortion clinic and gay club here in 1997 and an explosion at a clinic in Birmingham, Ala., in 1998. Collectively, the bombings killed two people and injured 150.

Mr. Rudolph made the pleas, first in federal court Wednesday morning in Birmingham and later in the day in Atlanta, as part of a deal he struck to avoid execution. Mr. Rudolph will serve four consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/national/14rudolph.html?oref=login

[Zenlitened]

1. I would happily put a bullet behind his ear. That man is an embodiment...

... of everything that's wrong with America today, after decades of religious extremism.

[Botany]

2. Take the needle Eric ....

.... if you are such a man why not ask for it? What a punk.

[Zenlitened]

6. I don't think he ever should been offered a plea. If this man...

... doesn't deserve the death penalty, then NO ONE does. It's that simple, in my view. This is exactly the sort of crime that the death penalty is for.

Up to now, I've been willing to support the death penalty for extreme cases. But here is yet ANOTHER case of unequal application. I think I'm about ready to concede that "limited use" is a fiction, and the only honest position is to oppose the death penalty, period.

[SheepyMcSheepster]

3. of course we want to hear the "reasoning" of a white terrorist

but those brown skin killers have no reasons and just hate us for our freedoms. :sarcasm:

[smoogatz]

4. You said it. He hates us for our freedom.

The arab extremists who blew up the WTC, on the other hand, hated us for our foreign policy.

[Zorra]

5. Your average republikan male that acted out his ignorant, misogynistic,

homophobic, dogmatically twisted fundie fantasies.