Do the crime, do the time. That’s the rule in this country; there’s no mommy exception.
If there were, environmental radical Briana Waters might not be looking at hard time after her conviction in Tacoma on Thursday on two counts of arson.
Waters, a winsome 32-year-old mother, used to a be member of a violent Earth Liberation Front cell known as “The Family.” The Family was into torching other people’s property – including homes – it considered threats to the environment. It did a lot of this.
One of its acts of ecoterror was the burning of the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001, a crime of exceptional ignorance and irony.
Waters and her partners believed researchers at the center were genetically modifiying trees. In fact, they were merely hybridizing fast-growing populars as an environmentally friendly alternative to logging in forests. The fire also destroyed living specimens of rare and endangered plants. The Family was a gang that couldn’t burn straight.
The University of Washington had to spend $7 million rebuilding the lab, but the research data and plants were gone forever.
In Tacoma’s federal court, prosecutors presented evidence that Waters – a former Evergreen State College student – provided the car and served as the lookout in this strike against the biosphere.
Afterward, Waters went straight, or tried to make it look that way. She cocooned, married, taught violin and gave birth to a daughter who is now 3. She repeatedly referred to her daughter during the trial. Some jurors were sympathetic enough to reject three charges, including one that would have given her at least 30 years. But as a whole, the jury rightly decided that maternity wasn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card.
Waters is reminiscent of other perpetrators of political crimes who went underground and wound up leading conventional and sometimes exemplary lives. A famous example was Katherine Ann Power, an antiwar radical who helped carry out a 1970 bank robbery in which one of her partners killed a Boston police officer.
Power escaped the law, moved to Oregon, married and raised a son. She taught cooking classes at the community college in Albany. In 1993, her conscience and distress led her to turn herself in. Thoroughly repentant, she served six years.
Waters, by contrast, did not turn herself in and has not accepted responsibility for her crimes. In other words, she’s still potentially dangerous.
Waters’ 3-year-old daughter, who will have to be raised by her father, deserves sympathy. Waters herself, not so much. This trial wasn’t about family. It was about The Family.
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