Hate on Trial: The Case Against America's Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi - Hardcover

Dees, Morris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067940614X ISBN 13: 9780679406143

Publisher: Villard, 1993

Synopsis

A crusading civil-rights attorney describes how he took on the overlord of the White Aryan Resistance in a courtroom showdown that turned outrage into justice after an Ethiopian college student was bashed to death by neo-Nazis in Portland, Oregon. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., and Fiffer follow up their bestselling collaboration, A Season for Justice , with this brisk, lucid, dramatic account of Dees's latest news-making case. After several skinheads fatally beat Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw in Portland, Ore., in 1988, Dees seized the opportunity to expose the hate group he suspected was behind the killers--the White Aryan Resistance (WAR)--as he had done earlier with a Ku Klux Klan-supported murder. Suing WAR and leader Tom Metzger, Dees and colleagues found a WAR lieutenant willing to testify that Metzger encouraged the violence, and thus to support the suit under Oregon laws regarding liability for acts of others. (One skinhead had already pleaded guilty in the criminal case.) The trial had dicey moments, as jurors found the white supremacist charismatic, but Dees's evidence and deft rhetoric won a $12.5 million judgment, now under appeal, against WAR and Metzger for Seraw's family. Although the book is self-serving, the authors responsibly address the free speech concerns the case raised. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, has pioneered the use of civil suits to attack racist groups, notably in a 1984 suit filed on behalf of a lynching victim's mother, which resulted in the bankrupting of a major Ku Klux Klan organization. (For an account of this suit, see Dees's A Season for Justice , LJ 5/15/91.) In this book, Dees and Fiffer tell the story of a trial in which the racist leaders of White Aryan Resistance were found liable for the 1988 murder by skinheads of an Ethiopian immigrant in Portland, Oregon. The first half of the book, focusing on the pre-trial investigation, contains much annoying hokum, but the authors settle on a more compelling tone as they proceed, offering a revealing glimpse of legal strategies in the details of the trial itself. Still, the story might be more effectively told by an outsider, less certain of the correctness of Dees's methods and more sensitive to legal niceties and controversies.
- Timothy Christenfeld, Columbia Univ.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Villard
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 067940614X
• ISBN 13: 9780679406143
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280