Legal News

The Ivins Case: Taking Stock of the Evidence

By Dan Slater

I’m a little dream-self, short and stout.
I’m the other half of Bruce — when he lets me out.
When I get all steamed up, I don’t pout.
I push Bruce aside, then I’m Free to run about!

– a poem by Bruce Ivins, the biodefense researcher at Fort Detrick who committed suicide last week as federal prosecutors prepared to indict him in connection with the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Bruce Ivins in a 2003 photo. (Frederick News Post/Associated Press)

Yesterday, the government unveiled its package of evidence against Bruce Ivins. As the WSJ reports, U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor acknowledged that the case against Ivins was circumstantial but said prosecutors around the country obtain convictions on circumstantial evidence “every day.”

Taylor said: “We believe we could have proven Dr. Ivins’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. We regret that we will not have the opportunity to present evidence to the jury.” Taylor conceded there was no physical evidence that tied Ivins to the mailbox in Princeton where the anthrax letters were mailed, but said authorities reached a “reasonable conclusion” that it was possible he had done so, based on his past actions.

Meanwhile, Venable’s Paul Kemp, who repped Ivins for more than a year, reasserted Ivins’s innocence and criticized the government for presenting what he called “heaps of innuendo” that failed to link Ivins directly to the crime and would never have to be tested in court. “It was an explanation of why Bruce Ivins was a suspect,” said Kemp. “But there’s a total absence of proof that he committed this crime.” Searches of Ivins’s house and cars turned up not a spore of anthrax, Ivins’s lawyers have said. And perusal of thousands of his e-mail messages turned up no indication that he planned to commit the crime or pleasure or regret at having committed it.

But we’d like to turn it over to you, Law Blog readers. Given the evidence, compiled below, which side of the Ivins case would you prefer to be on?

• At the time of the anthrax letters, Ivins was the custodian of a flask of highly purified anthrax spores that possessed certain genetic mutations identical to the anthrax used in the attacks.
• On Sept. 26, 2001, Ivins sent an email that read, “Bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax and sarin gas” and have “just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans.” The anthrax letters, sent days later, contained similar wording: “WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX . . . DEATH TO AMERICA . . . DEATH TO ISRAEL.”
• Ivins’s visits to his lab spiked in September and October of 2001, prior to the two anthrax mailings. He spent hours at a time after his normal shift ended at 4:45 p.m.
• Ivins claimed he was suffering serious mental health issues in the months preceding the attacks, and told a co-worker that he had “incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times” and feared he might not be able to control his behavior.

For more on Ivins from the NYT, click here and here. For the WaPo’s coverage, click here and here.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 07, 2008 (boomark / email).