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Anti-abortion activists from around the country are attempting to raise money for the defense of a man accused of killing Kansas doctor George Tiller in May, and Des Moines resident Dave Leach is organizing the effort.
Scott Roeder (mugshot)
Leach publishes a newsletter called “Prayer & Action News,” which advocates the doctrine of justifiable homicide in the case of abortion doctors. The man accused of murdering Tiller, Scott Roeder, was a contributor to the publication. Leach and several other anti-abortion activists want to hire a private attorney in order to pursue a “necessity defense” for Roeder, which in general terms says that it’s OK to commit a crime in order to avoid a much greater harm.
In an exclusive interview with The Iowa Independent in August, Leach said he had drafted a legal brief on Roeder’s behalf using the “necessity defense.” Leach’s argument is that Tiller’s murder stopped an untold number of abortions.
Now Leach is organizing an online auction of items on eBay to raise money, an effort that launched Sunday night. The items include several graphic drawings done by a fellow inmate and signed by Roeder. A spokesman for eBay initially told the Kansas City Star that while the company does not oppose all listings that raise money for legal defense funds, “our policy does not permit listings that benefit someone charged with or convicted of a crime.”
The company has since announced that it will remove the items it deems violate the site’s listing policy, however several items are still available, such as a Bible once owned by an Oregon woman who shot and wounded Tiller in 1993.
Leach did not respond to a request for comment by the Iowa Independent.
Since Tiller’s murder, Leach has garnered a lot of media attention, both for his ties to Roeder and for his controversial statements regarding acts of violence against abortion providers. Shortly after Roeder’s arrest, Leach told The Iowa Independent that when human law conflicts with God’s Laws, “we ought to obey God rather than man.” He later told The Des Moines Register that he is personally no danger to abortion providers because he doesn’t know enough about guns to do any harm.
In the mid-1990s, Leach’s association with the accused killer of a Florida abortion doctor helped persuade U.S. marshals to guard the Planned Parenthood clinic in Des Moines.
In the January 1996 issue of his newsletter, Leach published the Army of God manual, which advocates the killing of the providers of abortion and contains bomb-making instructions. Because of this, he was fired from his job as a writer for an Ankeny newspaper.
In 2002, he tried to air videotape of patients entering a local Planned Parenthood clinic on public-access cable TV. Mediacom Communications Corp. decided it would not allow him to air the footage.
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