Doctor’s Killer Puts Abortion on the Stand By MONICA DAVEY Published: January 28, 2010

Doctor’s Killer Puts Abortion on the Stand

By MONICA DAVEY

Published: January 28, 2010

WICHITA, Kan. — Scott Roeder, the man charged with murder in the shooting of George R. Tiller, one of the few doctors in the country to perform late-term abortions, took the witness stand in his own defense on Thursday, and said that, yes, he did it.

Yes, he bought a gun. Yes, he took target practice. Yes, he had learned about Dr. Tiller’s habits, his home address, his security precautions. And, yes, he shot Dr. Tiller last May 31 as Dr. Tiller stood inside his church.

“That is correct, yes,” Mr. Roeder told the jurors, in a calm, matter-of-fact voice.

But there was a twist.

Lawyers for Mr. Roeder, who provided the only testimony for the defense in a trial that has spanned several weeks, are hoping that jurors will consider Mr. Roeder’s motive: his growing opposition to abortion, which he deemed criminal and immoral, and his mounting sense that laws and prosecutors and other abortion opponents were never going to stop Dr. Tiller from performing them.

“I did what I thought was needed to be done to protect the children. I shot him,” he testified, adding at another point, “If I didn’t do it, the babies were going to die the next day.”

Was he remorseful? No, Mr. Roeder said without emotion. After the killing, he said, he felt “a sense of relief.”

And so, in a way, the hearing here, watched intensely by all sides of the abortion debate, turned into precisely what the presiding judge had said all along that it ought not to be — a trial over abortion. Judge Warren Wilbert has wrestled with requests from the prosecution and the defense over how to permit Mr. Roeder to mount a murder defense without allowing him to turn the case into a public forum on abortion.

But even with his pointed testimony, based on a ruling late Thursday by Judge Wilbert, Mr. Roeder continues to face a difficult legal hurdle in beating back a charge of first-degree murder.

Judge Wilbert ruled that he would not instruct the jury to consider a lesser charge when they begin deliberations on Friday. Mr. Roeder has pleaded not guilty to murder, but defense lawyers had argued that his beliefs about abortion might warrant a voluntary manslaughter conviction if jurors concluded that Mr. Roeder possessed, as Kansas law defines it, “an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force.”

Seated on the witness stand, facing a tiny courtroom gallery that included Dr. Tiller’s widow, Jeanne, abortion opponents from other parts of the country, and national abortion rights supporters, Mr. Roeder seemed quiet, almost lawyerly, in his responses to inquiries about the killing, in which Dr. Tiller was shot in the forehead, the gun pressed to his skin.

Mr. Roeder, 51, of Kansas City, Mo., told jurors that he had a growing sense of his own faith and opposition to abortion in the 1990s after watching “The 700 Club,” the evangelist Pat Robertson’s television talk show. Mr. Roeder’s views on religion and abortion, he said, went “hand in hand.”

Mr. Roeder acknowledged under cross-examination that he had, as early as 1993, thought about killing Dr. Tiller. A year before the shooting, he said, he had gone to Dr. Tiller’s church with a gun intending to shoot him. (Dr. Tiller was not there that day, he said.) And he said he considered other alternatives: cutting off Dr. Tiller’s hands with a sword, shooting him from a distance with a rifle, or finding him at his house.

Of his decision to go to the church, he said, “It was the only window of opportunity I saw that he could be stopped.”

Abortion opponents here, including some who have served time in jail for abortion clinic violence, praised Mr. Roeder for his testimony. But some complained bitterly that Judge Wilbert had severely limited the defense by barring the testimony of Phill Kline, a former Kansas attorney general who had unsuccessfully pursued criminal investigations against Dr. Tiller and by preventing jurors from considering some conviction short of murder.

Abortion rights supporters, meanwhile, called Mr. Roeder’s statements deeply chilling, and said they mandated nothing short than a first-degree murder conviction, which could carry a life sentence. “It should send a message that there is no justification for this,” said Vicki Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation, who sat in the court.

Over four days, prosecutors laid out a case that rarely dealt with abortion, but stuck instead to dates and times and forensic and witness evidence implicating Mr. Roeder in the Tiller shooting. Abortion rights supporters said that was as it should be: this was murder, plain and simple.

By the middle of the week, the courthouse had drawn some of the most outspoken members of the abortion debate from around the country.

“George Tiller shed the blood of 60,000 innocent children,” Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, told reporters. Mr. Terry (who is in a legal dispute over the use of the group’s name with Operation Rescue’s current president, Troy Newman) said that he was neither condoning nor condemning Mr. Roeder’s actions, but that people should remember the children.

Days after Mr. Roeder’s arrest, the United States Department of Justice announced it was investigating Dr. Tiller’s death to determine whether there was anyone else involved in the plot. On Thursday, Mr. Roeder acknowledged that he has friends who, like him, believe that the killing of abortion doctors is justifiable. One such friend, Shelley Shannon, was imprisoned for shooting Dr. Tiller in both arms in 1993. Still, Mr. Roeder said on Thursday, he acted alone.

Justice Department representatives are “actively monitoring” Mr. Roeder’s case, a department spokesman said, adding, “Our investigation into the murder of Dr. Tiller is open and ongoing.”

Guided by lawyers, Mr. Roeder methodically described the morning of the shooting — how he had fired the gun inside the church, driven away from Wichita, hidden the gun in a small town, and picked up a snack, a pizza. In the days after the killing, Dr. Tiller’s family announced that it would close the abortion clinic, the only one in Wichita.

So, Nola Foulston, the prosecutor asked him, do you feel you have successfully completed your mission?

“He’s been stopped,” Mr. Roeder said.

But do you feel you have successfully completed your mission, she asked again.

“Yes,” he said.

Emma Graves Fitzsimmons contributed reporting from Chicago.