Andy Stepanian Interview with Encyclopedia Britanica's Advocacy for Animals

[Carolyn Bailey]

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This week Advocacy for Animals is pleased to present the following interview with animal-rights activist Andy Stepanian.

In 2004 Andy and five members of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) USA, Inc., a group
dedicated to shutting down the notorious British animal-experimentation
firm Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), were indicted on charges of
“animal-enterprise terrrorism” under the federal Animal Enterprise
Protection Act (AEPA) of 1992. The AEPA criminalized as terrorism the
intentional physical disruption of an animal enterprise resulting in
“economic damage,” including loss of profits; under an amended version
of the law, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) of 2006, such
terrorism also encompassed “interfering” with the operations of an
animal enterprise. Andy and the SHAC defendants were eventually
convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to six years.
Their terrorism consisted of participating in nonviolent demonstrations
and, in the case of the SHAC defendants, running a Web site that posted
news of and expressions of support for protest activities, some of
which involved petty crimes such as vandalism and trespass. The case of
the “SHAC 7” (six activists and SHAC, Inc.) has been cited by critics of
the AEPA and AETA as evidence that the laws, as written and as applied,
violate the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. (For more on
the AEPA, the AETA, and Huntingdon Life Sciences, see the Advocacy
articles Green is the New Red and The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.)

Advocacy for Animals: Can you describe your involvement with SHAC and the activities that led to your conviction as an “animal-enterprise terrorist”?

Andy Stepanian: I was a regional organizer for a nonprofit called the Animal Defense League. Part of our campaigning was in support of the larger international campaign to close down Huntingdon
Life Sciences, a contract animal testing laboratory that killed 180,000
dogs, cats, primates, rabbits, fish, birds, and rodents annually.
Personally, I organized protests in the Northeast, spoke at colleges and
at concerts, and did media interviews. All of
these actions were in furtherance of a shared collective goal of ending
the animal cruelty that was happening at Huntingdon Life Sciences. In
2004, six individuals and I were arrested by the FBI and the Joint
Terrorism Task Force for allegedly conspiring to violate the Animal
Enterprise Protection Act. The charges varied for the seven of us
arrested; I was the only one charged with a single conspiracy count and
no substantive charge to go with it (this is usually unheard of.) After
the government handed down a very shaky indictment, and my name was
seldom mentioned at trial, what led to my conviction was my attendance
at a protest at an accounting firm called Deloitte and Touche.
Specifically, the government stated that Deloite severed their financial
relationship with Huntingdon after the protest. Subsequently,
Huntingdon lost their auditor and temporarily did not meet the
requirements to be a listed company on the stock exchange. I was
convicted and sentenced to three years incarceration, an additional year
of supervised release, and $1,000,001.00 of restitution.

AFA: The AEPA is extremely broad and vague (e.g., it seems to apply to nonviolent protests like lunch-counter sit-ins), and the kind of speech
you and the SHAC defendants engaged in appears to be constitutionally
protected (e.g., it doesn’t constitute incitement or “true threat”). So
what went wrong with the case?

AS: On its face this case was a litmus test of permissible speech within the new social environment of Web 2.0. What became clear as the government’s case progressed was that they were
seeing where their constitutional boundaries would be with regards to
this new technology. The SHAC-USA Web site became a central focus of the
government’s case. Historic U.S. case law regarding what newspapers
could report and opine on fell to the wayside as attorneys for the
government argued that Web sites were not analogous to newspapers or
newsletters and therefore were not deserving of such constitutional
protections. The Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) test of
what constitutes a “true threat” was not met at any point in the case,
but what the government did show was this reality that a lot of people
were angry about the cruelty perpetrated by Huntingdon and actions were
happening all over the world in solidarity with this movement to see
Huntingdon’s closure. [In Brandenburg, the Supreme Court held
that advocacy of violence or other lawless action is constitutionally
protected unless “such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing
imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such
action.”] The jury trial was a month-long theatrical whirlwind of bad
acts by third parties, not the defendants, repeated protest activity by
hundreds of caring people, and actions by dozens of unidentified people
that were in poor taste. Interestingly, the government never contended
that we were involved with the “bad acts” but rather that we conspired
to further them by calling for an international campaign of creative
actions. By the end of the trial the jury had no one to convict for the
laundry list of grievances made by the government, but they had us
defendants sitting at the table. They did not convict based on the law,
they did not convict based on the merits, or the constitution, but
rather based on their disoriented emotions.

AFA: You spent the last six months of your three-year sentence in a “Communication Management Unit”–an Orwellian term if there ever was one. What is a CMU? How do they compare to
maximum-security prisons in the U.S.?

AS: The Communications Management Unit is a secretive political prison program developed outside the authority of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). There are two CMU facilities
for male inmates in the federal system. Similarly there is a facility
like the CMU for women in the basement of the Federal Medical Center at
Carswell, Texas. The CMU exists to fully restrict and vet an inmate’s
ability to communicate with the outside world. For the last six months
of my sentence I was designated to the CMU at the United States
Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. USP Marion was the first “super-max”
prison in the United States, and in 2006 it was downgraded to a
medium-security prison. The downgrade only required that the USP Marion
remove live ammunition from its towers; however, the perimeter walls,
fences, restraints, and the rest of the facility remained intact. It was
still the same super-max prison it always was, but the inmates there
changed. They augmented the “hole” or “segregation” wing to become a
prison within the prison. Special construction went into the unit with
an objective of securing the housed inmates’ ability to send
communications outbound. This came in the way of welded pieces of metal
by hallway sally ports [gated entryways], netting and razor wire to
prevent the throwing of notes outward from the recreational cages, and
extra security cameras to cover each corner of the unit.

Where the CMU violates the most rights however is in its treatment of the inmates housed there. To make phone contact with the outside world, each inmate must register their family or acquaintance with the Bureau
of Prisons, and if approved can only make one 15-minute phone call a
week, between the hours of 10:00 am and 4:00 pm Eastern Time.
Additionally, families are denied contact visitation and limited to one
two-hour visit each month. Visits must be behind glass, both the inmate
and his visitor must comply with a search, and the visits have to occur
with the oversight of a live monitor and a monitor listening in via
telephone from Washington, DC. These restrictions on visitation and
telephone use are more intense than those of the Bureau’s current
super-max facility, ADX-Florence, the most restrictive prison in the
federal system. Family visitation is a central part of any inmate’s
“corrective process,” but the Bureau disregards this fact in the case of
the CMU, and although the men there are classified as low-, medium-, or
at times minimum-security inmates, the Bureau utilizes “special
administrative measures,” or SAMs, to house the lower-security inmates
in this maximum setting while avoiding the lawsuits they would otherwise
face for misdesignating inmates like this. The most alarming fact about
the CMU is its disproportionately large Muslim population. The CMU in
Marion is 70 percent Muslim, and the second CMU located in Terre Haute,
Indiana is estimated to be more than 90 percent Muslim. All of the
inmates with the exception of a handful (less than eight) have political
cases, with heavy media attention.

AFA: You are obviously not a dangerous criminal. So why were you sent to a CMU? Have other members of the SHAC 7 or other animal rights activists been confined in CMUs? What other kinds of
prisoners are held in CMUs, to your knowledge?

AS: I was transferred to the CMU, Marion in June 2008. I spent the last six and a half months of my incarcerated sentence there. I was not given advance notice of my transfer nor an opportunity
to appeal my redesignation. I was the only member of the SHAC 7 to be
designated to the CMU and to my knowledge the only active
animal-liberation activist to be transferred to a CMU. I was given a
notice of transfer after I arrived at the CMU that simply stated that I
was associated with SHAC and the ALF [the Animal Liberation Front]
(organizations named as terrorist) and therefore had to be redesignated
to a Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) program to monitor my
communications. Daniel McGowan, a social-justice activist,
environmentalist, and advocate for battered women was also designated to
the CMU in Marion. Edward Brown, an eccentric tax protestor from New
Hampshire was also designated to the CMU in Marion.

Edward, Daniel, and I were some of the non-Muslim minority, but we shared a common thread with the 70 percent Muslim majority: each of our cases was political in nature. Every man who was designated to the CMU
had a case that was either heavily reported upon in the media, a case
that directly involved US policy, or a case that was in some tangental
way connected to a group that was labeled as a terrorist organization by
U.S. authorities. Many of these cases involved U.S. foreign policy in
Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan or involved U.S. citizens who contributed
financially to (501-c3) nonprofits that were alleged to have terror
connections. To put it simply, CMUs are political prisons on U.S. soil.

AFA: What was it like to be confined in a CMU?

AS: The CMU was a prison within the larger prison. As I said, all telephone calls were monitored, both by computer recording and by a live monitor and limited to a single 15 minute phone
call each week. At the CMU, unlike other prison compounds, there is no
food line or “chow hall”; instead meals are delivered through a secure
set of sally-ports, each monitored by camera, and distributed by the
inmates themselves in the CMU unit. Unlike most prison compounds there
is no yard. Instead there are three outdoor cages exposed to open air.
Light passes between the cage tops, which are layered with razor wire,
and there is a catwalk that surrounds the three cages. The catwalk is
the only area where you can look up and see open sky without the
intrusion of razor wire, concrete walls, or towers. The visitation
restriction to one two-hour visit per month is exceptionally disruptive
to fathers housed at the CMU and men who have families who wish to see
them. Likewise these restrictions are disruptive to their families.
Children want to see their fathers, families want to see their loved
ones. Love is a far more corrective exercise than the restrictions
imposed upon these men, yet the government makes it clear that these
restrictions are not corrective in nature but rather punitive or done as
a means to control information between “parties of interest” to the
government. These parties of interest are not always security threats;
often they are political threats exercising their First Amendment
rights.

AFA: CMUs appear to have been established secretly and illegally. Are there now any legal challenges to their existence or to the confinement of individual prisoners within them?

AS: The CMU was established outside of the guidelines set forth in the APA because a similar program was attempted by the FBOP and was shut down by Congress. This current CMU program is
not APA-compliant, and it will continue to break the law until it
becomes APA-compliant. Harley Lappin, the director of the FBOP,
established this program illegally as a means to house high-profile
political prisoners, specifically Muslims, and is currently trying to
ratify the program’s existence and make the units permanent. Despite
Lappin’s attempts to solidify the CMU, the program has become the focus
of several legal challenges. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing
the FBOP, specifically challenging the CMU’s lack of due process, and
is demanding an injunction halting the transfer of one inmate designated
to the CMU in Terre Haute. Similarly, the Center for Constitutional
Rights (CCR) is suing the FBOP, Harley Lappin, Eric Holder, and the
Obama administration on behalf of a handful of inmates currently housed
in a CMU, as well as on behalf of their families. The CCR is challenging
the constitutionality of the program itself, challenging the programs
illegal inception outside the APA, and arguing that the denial of visits
and contact with inmates’ families is punitive and not corrective or in
the interest of security; it is also declaring that the racial/ethnic
disparity is a violation of the inmates’ civil rights.

AFA: The AEPA and the AETA are directed against animal-rights activists. Why are there not similar laws directed against violent antiabortion
activists and members of right-wing militias?

AS: The AEPA and AETA are designer statutes that target specifically animal-rights activists. One key focus of the law is the intention of those accused of violating it. If an animal enterprise
engages in disruptions to a competing animal enterprise, it is viewed
as capitalism as usual, and is honored by the law; however, if an
activist lawfully disrupts the functioning of an animal enterprise for
her or his own moral, spiritual, or political purposes, then their
actions are not honored and they could be prosecuted as a terrorist.
This type of designer statute focuses on defending the capital interests
of animal enterprises while trampling the civil liberties of activists
and chilling free speech. Furthermore, you see a double standard from
government agencies when it comes to other special-interest groups that
engage in actions far more extreme than that of animal activists. We can
see this political double-speak when a Tea Party-aligned extremist
flies a plane into the IRS building in Houston and it is called an
“isolated incident” by a “disgruntled man,” or when an antiabortion
extremist murders an abortion provider and is called a “lone-wolf” and
is allowed to hold a press conference from the jail where he is being
held. This double-speak drives home the message that free speech and
direct actions are viewed differently based on the “cause” the extremist
represents.

AFA: Some independent journalists have compared efforts to portray animal-rights activists as terrorists to the Red Scares of the 20th century. How successful do you think the “Green
Scare” has been? Has it discouraged members of the animal-rights and
environmental movements from advocating, protesting, and organizing?

AS: This phenomenon which some have labeled the “Green Scare” has had some impact on animal and environmental activism, but I believe it has not had the impact that select prosecutors and the
special interests that represent the animal enterprises have desired.
Will Potter, a freelance journalist and author, has chronicled the
government’s efforts and activists’ responses brilliantly in his blog, Green is the New Red,
and I suggest anyone interested in learning more about this topic
should bookmark and share his blog with others. Often what we have seen
is that these laws are being used against the above-ground, law abiding
supporters of direct actions and not those taking the actions
themselves. The ALF and ELF (the Earth Liberation Front) know that the
direct actions they are taking [such as vandalism and arson] are
illegal, and there are state and federal laws that already exist to
prosecute people who engage in direct-action activities. Because of
this, these groups have always taken precautions to avoid getting caught
and continue to do so. In many cases the introduction of the AEPA and
AETA has had little or no effect on the functioning of these already
illegal underground groups. Where you do see some impact is in the legal
realm of activism. Some activists have become uncertain as to whether
or not their group’s activities can fall under this overbroad term of
“economic disruption to an animal enterprise” and hence have scaled back
their legitimate campaigns. This is particularly dangerous, because the
work that all above-ground groups do is essential to each animal they
are advocating for. The animals need the efforts of those groups now and
cannot wait for nonprofits to run each and every move past expensive
legal teams. In this case there has been an impact and for this reason
the AEPA and AETA must also be challenged.

AFA: The case against you and your colleagues was heard by a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which affirmed your convictions. More recently, a petition for an en banc
hearing was denied. Where does the case stand now?

AS: My codefendants and I are currently filing for cert [a writ for reexamination of a case) in the Supreme Court. We are willing to take this all the way to have our verdicts overturned. We
have a responsibility to do this, not only for ourselves, but to protect
free speech for animal activists and any other marginalized party who
will later be prosecuted by a designer statute like the AETA.

AFA: How has your prosecution and imprisonment affected you personally? How has it affected, or how will it affect, your advocacy and political work?

AS: To say that my arrest, prosecution, and prison sentence has not affected my loved ones and I would be a lie, but I constantly remind myself not to harp on the bad things that I cannot
erase. I try to always see a silver lining in situations, and I can see
one even in what I experienced. I am thankful that I was given the
privilege to meet some amazing men at the CMU. I truly believe that they
have helped me become a better person. They helped to erode stereotypes
I may have formulated in my own mind and showed me that the faces that
we see on CNN and in journalistic accounts of wars overseas in places
like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza, and Iraq have families, lots of love,
and generosity attached to them. I learned a great deal about people. I
left this ordeal with life lessons that no private education could have
awarded me.

I have since moved my own political work into a more transparent venue. I have been designing and distributing benefit T-shirts that support charitable efforts like that of Farm Sanctuary, relief work in Cameroon, and the efforts of Clean Ocean Action. I also have
been offering consulting to fledgling nonprofits and have done public
relations work for groups like The Surfrider Foundation, To Write Love
On Her Arms, The Uganda Skateboard Union, and numerous artists who have
chosen to braid political themes into their music and visual arts
through a group that my friends Danielle Thompson, Dan Tudor, and I
started called The Sparrow Media Project.

Images: Andy Stepanian; Members of the SHAC 7: from left to right, Andy Stepanian, Lauren Gazzola, Kevin Jonas, Josh Harper, Jake Conroy, and Darius Fulmer—courtesy Center for Constitutional Rights; protesters outside the London offices of Stephens, Inc., an HLS investor—Touhig Sion/Corbis; beagle undergoing a skin experiment inside an HLS lab, 2001—courtesy Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.

To Learn More

• The SHAC 7
• The Equal Justice Alliance
• U.S. v. SHAC 7, from the Center for Constitutional Rights
• Green is the New Red, by Will Potter

http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2010/09/an-interview-w...