Source: http://minnesota8.net/appkroncke.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 05:08:34+00:00

Document:
[p. 699] The defendants admit that they entered the Little Falls draft board office with the express intent to hinder and interfere with the administration of the Selective Service Act. By way of defense, they claim that their actions were justified.
The trial court permitted the defendants to call many witnesses [n. 3] who testified, over the government's objection, on these issues: the damage to Vietnamese society caused by the war; the impact of the war on Cambodia; the extent of civilian casualties in Vietnam and Cambodia; the impact of an act of civil disobedience on bringing the war to an end; the ecological damage to Vietnam; [p. 700] the extent to which draftees carry the burden of the war; the effect of domestic protests and acts of civil disobedience on the decision- making of high government officials; and the probability that the war will continue unless there is domestic opposition to it. The defendants testified to their moral and religious reasons for committing the acts with which they were charged.
David Gutknecht: one of the founders of the Twin Cities' Draft Information Center; draft resister and counselor; defendant in Gutknecht v. United States, 396 U.S. 295, 90 S.Ct. 506, 24 L.Ed.2d 532 (1970).
The defendants cite a number of cases and a tentative draft of Section 3.02 of the Model Penal Code to support their view that the jury should have been permitted to determine whether their acts [p. 701] were justified. We do not believe that the code or the cases support the defendants' view that the requested instructions should have been given. Two of the cases, United States v. Nye and United States v. Ashton, involved revolts by seamen because they believed that their ships were unseaworthy and their lives endangered. United States v. Holmes involved a case in which a sailor threw passengers out a lifeboat and sought to justify his action on the grounds that it was necessary to save other lives. Commonwealth v. Wheeler and Rex v. Borne involved abortions by doctors who sought to justify their acts on the grounds that the abortions were necessary to protect the health or life of the mother. State v. Jackson involved a case in which a father kept his child out of school to protect her health. In Chesapeake & O. R. Co. v. Commonwealth, a railway company, charged with violating a criminal statute requiring it to maintain separate railway cars for blacks and whites, defended against the charge on the grounds that an unavoidable accident had prevented it from complying on this one occasion. And in State v. Johnson, the court denied the defendant the right to assert the defense of justification to a charge of operating a snowmobile on a trunk highway, on the grounds that the defense of necessity applied only in emergency situations where the peril is instant and overwhelming, and leaves no alternative but the conduct in question.
We turn, then, to the broader contentions on which we believe the defendants truly rely to justify their acts: (1) that the war in Indochina is invalid because it has not been formally declared by Congress; (2) that the Selective Service system is being operated in an unconstitutional manner in that it is used to draft men for the Indochina war; (3) that the war is immoral and unjust, and the defendants were justified in committing the acts they did in order to protest the war and help bring it to an end . . . .
To the extent that the defendants acted as they did to test the constitutionality [p. 702] of the war and the draft, they rely in part on the precedent of the early 1960 "sit-ins", used by civil rights workers to test the constitutionality of state and local laws and customs requiring segregation of public eating facilities. As legitimate as this technique may be, those who use it must risk the possibility that their tactics will be found inappropriate or the governmental action valid. The latter is the case here.
No court decisions have been handed down since Perkins to cause us to reconsider the decision we made there. And in United States v. Crocker, 420 F.2d 307 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, 397 U.S. 1011, 90 S.Ct. 1240, 25 L.Ed.2d 424 (1970), we rejected the contention that the Military Selective Service Act of 1967, 50 U.S.C. App. § 451, et seq., is unconstitutional insofar as it functions to draft men for the Indochina war.
We turn to [the defendants’] contention that they were legally justified in violating the provisions of the Selective Service Act as a protest to the "immoral" war in Indochina and as a means of bringing that war to an end.
"From the earliest times when man chose to guide his relations with fellow men by allegiance to the rule of law rather than force, he has been faced with the problem how best to deal with the individual in society who through moral conviction concluded that a law with which he was confronted was unjust and therefore must not be followed. Faced with the stark reality of injustice, men of sensitive conscience and great intellect have sometimes found only one morally justified path, and that path led them inevitably into conflict with established authority and its laws. Among philosophers and religionists throughout the ages there has been an incessant stream of discussion as to when, if at all, civil disobedience, whether by passive refusal to obey a law or by its active breach, is morally justified. However, they have been in general agreement that while in restricted circumstances a morally motivated act contrary to law may be ethically justified, the action must be non-violent and the actor must accept the penalty for his action. In other words, it is commonly conceded that the exercise of a moral judgment based upon individual standards does not carry with it legal justification or immunity from punishment for breach of the law."
[p. 704] It follows that the defendants' motivation in this case cannot be accepted as a legal defense or justification. We do not question their sincerity, but we also recognize that society cannot tolerate the means they chose to register their opposition to the war.

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