Copyright (c) 1995 First Things (May
1995).
The media also began to circle around. The day before, a cameraman for a
Waco television station had been told by an ambulance dispatcher that
the ATF had asked them to have three ambulances on standby for Sunday
morning. A paramedic had also told him that "something big" was going to
happen over the weekend. Editors from the
In the text, the souls of the faithful who have been slain for the word
of God cry out to God, "How long before thou wilt . . . avenge our
blood?" They are given white robes and told to "rest for a little
season" until the number of their fellow servants who have been killed
as they have been should be complete. The Sixth Seal that follows brings
about the destruction of humankind. Arnold and Tabor in their radio
colloquy sought to persuade Koresh that the term translated "a little
season" meant in the original Greek (chronos)
a period of as much as a year, leaving time for Koresh to complete his
work before the Sixth Seal supervened. Koresh apparently accepted this
idea, for on the day after Passover he sent out a letter via his lawyer
saying that God had permitted him to explain "in structured form the
decoded messages of the Seven Seals," and that upon completion of that
task he would surrender.
But they labored manfully onward to reach the desired and necessary
conclusion by way of a concatenation of conjectures:
We were pursuing
realities pertaining to the spirit that this Court did not-does not
recognize, as they did not recognize 2,000 years ago. Right from the
beginning, the spiritual aspect of this was totally and absolutely
rejected. But it was the very core of why we were at Mt. Carmel, and
essentially, why we acted the way that we acted. . . .
These Defendants, and
other adult Branch Davidians, engaged in a conspiracy to cause the
deaths of federal agents. It was part of the beliefs of the Branch
Davidians, expressed and taught by their leader, that they must bring
about a violent conflict with federal agents, thereby forcing the agents
to use deadly force against them, and by dying in the ensuing battle to
be "translated" immediately to Heaven.
If the firearm is legal, the additional sentence is five years. If it is
an illegally "enhanced" weapon, the sentence is enhanced to thirty
years. In response to defense attornies’ contentions that the
determination of whether the weapons involved were enhanced was a matter
of fact to be determined by the jury, the court disagreed, announcing
that "the type of weapon is not an element of the offense." What the
jury was to determine was the
mens rea
or "guilty mind" of the defendant, not the means used to carry out the
intended offense. On the basis of this reasoning, the judge felt free to
conclude that all convicted of Count Three had access to enhanced
weapons. But he expressed exasperation with the recently adopted
mandatory sentencing guidelines (which, though overruled on appeal, he
had found unconstitutional in an earlier case).
Brad Branch: 40 years,
plus fine of $2,000;
Jaime Castille: 40
years, plus fine of $2,000;
Livingston Fagan: 40
years, plus fine of $5,000;
Dean M. Kelley is Counselor on Religious Liberty for the National
Council of Churches. He is the author of
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