Jailed Researcher Still Won't Testify

SPOKANE - A Washington State University researcher spent his 35th birthday behind bars yesterday, jailed two months so far for refusing to tell a grand jury what he knows about an animal-rights group's 1991 raid.

Rik Scarce contends that no amount of time in a lockup will get him to talk and that he is being punished for not cooperating with the federal investigation.

"I'm in here with 549 other men and women who are here for punishment, and I'm not treated any differently," Scarce told the Moscow-Pullman Daily News in an interview at the Spokane County Jail. "This will be the worst birthday of my life."

U.S. District Judge Fremming Nielsen, who found Scarce in contempt April 6 and ordered him jailed May 14, has said Scarce would be released immediately if he changed his mind about testifying.

U.S. Attorney Carroll Gray said his office filed a written objection Monday to a motion by Scarce's lawyer seeking his client's release.

"We still think he should be held until he responds to the questions," Gray said yesterday.

A group calling itself the Animal Liberation Front claimed responsibility for the August 1991 raid at Washington State University in which research animals were uncaged and offices and computer equipment damaged.

Scarce, a graduate student in sociology, is the author of "Eco-Warriors," a book on radical environmental and animal-rights groups.

He contends it would be unethical for him to disclose

confidential conversations he had with possible suspects in the WSU break-ins because the discussions were part of his research, said his attorney, Jeffry Finer.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has rejected Scarce's contention that he has a writer's and scholar's privilege to keep promises of confidentiality to his subjects.

On at least two occasions last year, Scarce also acted as a spokesman for environmental groups protesting federal forest management.

The U.S. attorney's office has said the grand jury wants Scarce to testify about conversations he had with Rodney Coronado, a reputed leader of the Animal Liberation Front, who was house-sitting with others for Scarce when the WSU break-ins occurred.

Prosecutors believe Coronado picked up Scarce at the Moscow, Idaho-Pullman, Wash., airport the day after the raids and that the two discussed the break-ins. The grand jury also wants to know the identities of others who stayed at Scarce's home.

If he refuses to testify, Scarce could remain in jail until the grand jury's term ends in December.

"I'm not being intimidated by the American government into kowtowing to their wishes that I act as one of their agents, much less their wishes that I write about something like the mechanics of street paving," Scarce said.

"Our freedoms are being eroded on every front; it is insidious, deliberate, slow and painstaking."

Scarce is the second person held for contempt in the grand-jury probe. Jonathan Paul, 27, was released in April after spending five months in jail for refusing to testify.