Reno Posts Reward For Doctor Killer
Federal officials offered a $500,000 reward today for the killer of Dr. Barnett Slepian, an abortion provider, and set up an interagency task force to crack down on violence and threats aimed at abortion clinics.
The slaying of Slepian last month by a sniper who fired into his suburban Buffalo, New York, home "was just one more act of violence in a series of savage attacks against providers of reproductive health care," Attorney General Janet Reno told a news conference.
She noted that:
- Four other abortion doctors in upstate New York and Canada had been shot and wounded in recent years.
- Twenty clinics in Florida, Louisiana and Texas were splashed this summer with foul-smelling butyric acid.
- Two North Carolina clinics suffered arson attacks and attempted bombings this fall.
- 10 clinics in Indiana, Tennessee, Kansas and Kentucky received letters last month falsely claiming to contain deadly anthrax spores.
"These attacks and others seek to undermine a woman's basic constitutional right the right to reproductive health care," Reno said. "And while some people may oppose that right, no one should ever use violence to impede it."
The new National Clinic Violence Task Force will be headed by Bill Lann Lee, acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's civil rights division. Since 1994, the division has brought 27 criminal and 17 civil cases under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.
The task force will include civil rights and criminal division attorneys and agents from the FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; U.S. Marshals Service; and U.S. Postal Service. Assistant Treasury Secretary Elisabeth Bresee will assist Lee in running the task force.
In announcing the $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Slepian's killer, Reno asked anyone with information to call 1-800-281-1184.
Lee's team will review the investigations of the attacks and threats "looking at the national picture." Neither he nor Reno would say there was any evidence at this time of a national conspiracy behind the wave of violence.
From mid-1994 until early 1996, a federal grand jury in suburban Alexandria, Virginia, looked for evidence of a national conspiracy behind an earlier wave of anti-abortion violence. It did not find such a conspiracy, but did find evidence that was later used by other federal grand juries around the country to bring indictments in a handful of arson cases.
The new task force will also train local law enforcement and abortion providers in how to respond to and prevent such attacks.
"If I find a need to send marshals out, I'm going to send marshals out," Reno said. In 1994, federal marshals were stationed temporarily at two dozen threatened clinics.
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN