In any case, if she was roughed up, without provocation, then those who roughed her up are solely to blame. Suing AN was merely an example of "deep pockets" and "joint and several liability" doctrines, motivated by PC sentiments. The Southern Law Poverty Center routinely uses this tactic to silence those it doesn't like.
It's not a "deep pockets" thing, it's a "shallow pockets" thing. Deep pockets cases are where you want the money, so you drag somebody with lots of money into the case if you can. In this case, and Morris Dee's previous KKK case, the objective isn't *getting* money - it's *taking away* all the money the bastards have to put them out of business, and then twisting the knife and rubbing salt in the wounds by using their former Bad White Boys playground for something they dislike. If they had deep pockets, this would be hard. But soft targets like the AN or KKK chapter don't have a lot of money, so a lawsuit for shooting at people or beating them up can be enough to bankrupt them, even if all you get is a couple of double-wides on a hunk of scrubby land. Also, they're less likely to have good legal representation (at least these days - in the KKK's heyday the town judge and lawyers might well have been members), so they're easier to beat. Also, this is rural Idaho - stunningly gorgeous country, where the traditional way to relate to the wildlife involves firearms, so even if she *had* been shooting her gun it'd've been pretty normal. The newspaper reports didn't say whether the real bright Aryan boys decided gunshots must have been an invading Jew army before they saw that the car was full of white people, or whether they at least looked at them enough to decide they weren't blacks or cops... Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639