Another Co-op Bomber Pleads Guilty, Three Acquitted
FUR COMMISSION USA PRESS RELEASE, SEPTEMBER 11, 1999
Another Co-op Bomber Pleads Guilty, Three Acquitted
By Simon Ward, Communications Director, FCUSA
Straight Edger and animal rights activist Clinton Ellerman has confessed to making the explosives used in the March 1997 bombing of the Fur Breeders Cooperative in Sandy, Utah. Pipe bombs and a fire caused $900,000 in damage to trucks and offices.
On Aug. 19, Ellerman, 22, told the federal court that he had been recruited to build five pipe bombs by his brother, Douglas, 20, who pleaded guilty to his part in the attack last year. According to the Associated Press (Aug. 19), Clinton said that he had not wanted to be involved in the actual attack, but he “knew what the bombs would be used for.”
In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to drop ten related charges, but he still faces a mandatory 30-year prison sentence unless District Court Judge Thomas Greene decides to be lenient. Sentencing has been set for Nov. 16.
On trial with Ellerman were three other defendants: Andrew Bishop, 24, Sean Gautschy, 23, and Adam Peace, 21, while another defendant, Alexander Slack, committed suicide in June. A jury cleared all three defendants of all charges on Sept. 9, despite their being implicated by Douglas Ellerman, who is currently serving a sentence of seven years and two months, and must pay $750,000 in restitution.
Douglas Ellerman had faced a minimum 35-year jail sentence, but agreed to become a witness for the prosecution and implicate others, including his brother, in return for leniency. “I knew I could get some time if I got caught,” he testified on Sept. 3, “but I didn’t know it could be for the rest of my life” (Deseret News, Sept. 6).
According to Douglas Ellerman’s testimony, he, Gautschy, Bishop and Slack broke into the co-op and split into pairs. Ellerman smashed a glass door, then he and Slack lit two fires and planted a bomb inside the building. Meanwhile, Bishop and Peace placed two bombs apiece under two trucks. Afterward, the group recorded a message of what they did and played it back on the answering machine of the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade to publicize the attack.
Douglas Ellerman also described their alleged attempt six days earlier to bomb the co-op, which was aborted when Peace fled because he thought he had seen a police officer.
However, the defense attorneys contended that Douglas Ellerman was simply desperate to implicate others, and convinced the jury that his testimony was not credible. Gautschy and Bishop also presented alibis, while there was no physical evidence that the alleged bombing attempt in which Peace was implicated ever took place.
Federal prosecutor David Schwendiman was philosophical in defeat, saying the case was important even if the jury did not agree with the government’s evidence (Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 10). “The statement has been made that this kind of activity will not be tolerated.”
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