Afterlife | Standoff: What Happened at Ruby Ridge?
Slate Presents
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2018
⏱️ 2 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the final episode of Standoff, our narrative miniseries on the story of Ruby Ridge, host Ruth Graham recaps the prosecution of Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris, and explores how the story of the standoff became legendary among the modern far right.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Chuck Peterson is a criminal defense lawyer in Boise. |
| 0:05.2 | He started his career as an Army lawyer, |
| 0:07.9 | and by the 1990s he was back home in Idaho and getting restless. |
| 0:12.5 | I had a good practice, had plenty of experience, |
| 0:16.0 | and then Ruby Ridge happened. |
| 0:19.1 | Like a lot of people, Peterson had followed the standoff on the news. |
| 0:23.4 | On what turned out to be the day Randy Weaver surrendered, |
| 0:26.7 | he heard that a respected trial lawyer named Jerry Spence had offered to represent Randy. |
| 0:32.5 | Peterson knew Spence as a larger-than-life character, |
| 0:35.5 | who was well known for winning big verdicts for underdogs and the little guy. |
| 0:40.0 | He was more than six feet tall with a mane of silver hair and often wore a fringed buckskin jacket and cowboy boots in the courtroom. |
| 0:48.3 | And in Randy Weaver, Spence saw a typical little guy. |
| 0:54.3 | My friend said don't take the case. |
| 0:57.0 | My sister said, don't take the case. |
| 1:01.3 | Here's Spence, talking to Tom Brokaw about why he took Randy on as a client. |
| 1:06.6 | How can you defend a racist? |
| 1:08.6 | How can you defend this person? |
| 1:11.0 | The other side of me is that as long as he's free to have those views, you and I can have ours. |
| 1:19.0 | And when he loses his, we've lost ours. |
| 1:24.0 | Spence claimed to have never lost a case. |
| 1:37.3 | The rest of this episode is available exclusively to Slate Plus subscribers. |
| 1:41.3 | You can join directly within Apple Podcasts or Spotify, |
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