“All right,” said D’Amico. “I anticipate a decision by tomorrow afternoon, if you don’t have a problem with that, say, between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. Make plans accordingly. “Any questions, gentlemen?”
“No, Your Honor,” said Marusak.
“No, Judge, thank you,” said Barket.
“See you tomorrow.”
That night, D’Amico mulled over the facts. It was not going to take him much time to make his decision. But there had been a defense presented and he had to take it seriously—that Kopp, like others in the pro-life movement, was not the murdering kind. Kopp’s confession that he shot Slepian was big, of course, but not definitive in the case. There have been people who have confessed to crimes they didn’t commit. D’Amico didn’t weigh the confession in a vacuum. Indeed, he felt the prosecution didn’t need it to convict Kopp. It’s just one piece of evidence, and the pool of evidence was deep. Barket hadn’t mounted a defense like Paul Cambria would have, had not tried to make hay with the delay in police finding the rifle. But D’Amico wouldn’t have found that very persuasive anyway, he thought. What, the police planted the gun? What’s more plausible, he reflected, that they simply couldn’t find it during the winter initially, or that the police planted it? What makes sense? Are you kidding me? Does anyone really believe that the police decided seven months after the murder to bury a weapon that turns out to be the one that fired the shot?
The next afternoon, D’Amico took his seat just before 2:30 p.m. He looked at Kopp, who as usual wore a blue blazer and tan pants. The judge wasted little time. “I have concluded, Mr. Kopp, that you are guilty as charged.”
Kopp turned to Bruce Barket and smiled. Was it a nervous smile? Sheepish smile? Sarcastic smile? Journalists in court tried to decide. It was, like everything about him, hard to tell. Court was adjourned, Kopp led from the room by police. In the gallery, a group of friends gathered around Lynne Slepian. She said little. There were no tears, or cheers. Sentencing was set for May 9. At that time, Kopp would have his chance to make a detailed statement, explain himself.
After the verdict, journalists, searching for answers, called his stepmother, Lynn Kopp, in Texas, for a reaction. She, too, wondered why it had it taken Jim so long to confess to the crime. “He said he didn’t mean to kill but that he meant to protect unborn children,” Lynn said. “Isn’t that a contradiction? If you did it, if you had such intense feelings, why hide from them after you’ve done the deed?” Kopp already held his stepmother in low regard. Did he read her comments? He read everything. The liberal media, the pro-death media, had gone to his stepmother for comment on his case. He burned. And smiled. He expected nothing less.
Among his friends in the pro-life movement, both in the mainstream and on the fringe, there were many opinions about him once he admitted shooting Slepian. There were those who supported what he had done, who said it didn’t matter if he intended to kill the doctor or just wound him, who argued that the violence was entirely justified. Others did not openly approve of shooting abortion doctors, and could not believe that Jim would ever shoot anybody. They believed the FBI was framing him. But once he confessed, they had to concede that Jim had lied and, apparently, was capable of violence. Friends were saddened by what Kopp had done, and criticized his actions. Then there was Joan Andrews, one of his earliest inspirations in the movement, and others who remained torn over whether or not he was guilty. They had thought of him as such a low-key man, so gentle. Could he be covering for someone else? That kind of sacrifice would be so like him. But then, he had confessed. He was a truthful man. She had to believe what he said.
Susan Brindle never could figure it out. Either Jim confessed because he did it, or he was so messed up that he felt confessing was what God wanted him to do. Either way, she prayed for him every day. And, God bless him, if he did it, or conspired to help someone else pull the trigger, he should pay the price.
James Gannon was as shocked as everyone else by the whole thing. But if Jim said he did it, it must be so. Gannon followed the official church line. He opposed abortion, and capital punishment, and murder. If abortion is the same thing as killing, then how is killing one more person, a doctor, going to help society? Gannon was among those friends who visited Kopp regularly at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, where he was being held. They wrote letters, and when they spoke on the phone, Jim’s voice sounded so clear, like he was right around the corner. “So you mind if I stop by for a couple of days?” Jim joked. Gannon laughed.
But there were times when it wasn’t easy having a friend like Kopp. He used to tell people, “One day you’ll get a letter from me and it will seem completely out of character, and you’ll be like, ‘Jim, what the hell is this?’” Gannon wouldn’t hear from him for weeks without explanation. Sometimes Gannon’s letters to Kopp at the prison were returned unopened. He could not understand why.
Jim’s sister, Anne, spoke to the media. She could never believe her youngest brother would shoot anyone. Jim was a wonderful person. But obviously he had taken his cause to a level she could never imagine, or condone. In fact, she even wondered if Jim had left evidence at the murder scene on purpose. Perhaps he wanted God to decide his fate. It would be God’s will if he was caught—or got away.
“Jim might have thought, ‘God, I don’t know if what I’m doing is entirely the right thing to do, so I’m going to leave it up to you,’” Anne said. “‘And if you want them to catch me, I’m going to put my hat out here so that they’ll have no problem catching me. I’m willing to face the consequences.’ He left it open so that God could bring all the force down on him if necessary.”
When the calls from reporters did not cease, Anne decided to issue a special kind of statement. She hung a sign in front of her home. It read, “All we’ve known about Jim is that he works after the model of Martin Luther King.”
Sentencing Hearing Erie County Hall
Buffalo, N.Y.
May 9, 2003
Jim Kopp’s only hope was that he and Bruce Barket could convince Judge D’Amico to choose a lighter sentence, perhaps 15 years instead of the maximum 25 to life. D’Amico received letters from Kopp’s brother and sister asking for leniency. They told the judge they all enjoyed a normal family life growing up, and Jim was once a regular guy. Somewhere along the line he had gone off track, but he had come from a good family, he is a human being. Please have mercy. It wasn’t the first time they had written him.Earlier, they had urged D’Amico to ensure their brother got a fair hearing at trial. In court, D’Amico first had to deal with a motion raised by
Barket. He had proposed, just two days earlier, to delay sentencing until after Kopp’s trial on the federal charge of using deadly force to interfere with the right to reproductive services. That way, Kopp would not run the risk of incriminating himself by anything he might say at the sentencing. D’Amico rejected the request. “With all due respect to the federal authorities,” he said, “I can’t operate on their timetable and I have no idea what their timetable is. We are going to proceed. Go ahead, Mr. Marusak.”
Joe Marusak presented an even darker, more detailed profile of Kopp than he had in his closing remarks in March. He took the court back to Kopp’s early days in California, his middle-class life, the Eagle Scout, honors student at UC Santa Cruz, how he followed his girlfriend to Texas, got his master’s degree in biology. “But he never used that scientific talent,” Marusak observed. “We don’t know of any steady employment that he undertook in the field of science.” He cataloged the arrests, more than a hundred of them, Kopp’s dual identity as peaceful man of faith and sniper, his manipulation of friends. “He developed, basically, fraudulently and deceitfully a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, consciously. He convinced everybody—every FBI interview[ee], every acquaintance of his, to a person, is effusive that this man wouldn’t even hurt a fly. He lived a lie for 20 years.”