The Case for Justifiable Homicide

The petitioners began lining up before any of the workers were scheduled to arrive. Against a fence overlooking the Ladies Center in Pensacola, Florida, the protesters prepared their signs showing images of dead fetuses, sang their songs, and joined hands in prayer. Among them was forty-year-old Paul Hill, a fixture over the last several weeks, who had recently gained national recognition for his extreme views.

While most people were content to try to convince the young female patients who visited this center to gain education and assistance with a procedure that to some was akin to murder, Hill took a more aggressive stance. Armed with a concealed black pump-action shotgun, he decided to take matters into his own hands. It wasn’t enough to scream at women, saying things like “Mommy, Mommy, don’t kill me!” as they headed into the center—an action that had landed him a disorderly conduct charge. He knew he needed to do more.i God demanded that he do more. He was going to rid the world of the scourge of abortion once and for all by falling in the footsteps of one his heroes.

That hero, Michael Griffin, was serving a life sentence for killing David Gunn, an abortion center physician, in March 1993. He was so inspired by the actions of the twenty-three-year-old man that it became a new cause for him. Shortly thereafter, he called the Phil Donahue talk show and declared that he was the new national spokesman for abortionist killers, telling the host in a later television interview, if someone were to come across a man shooting children on a playground, “if you were to come up behind that man and shoot him in the back three times, you would have protected and saved innocent live from undue harm.”ii

On this early morning of July 29, 1994, he was prepared to do everything that God required. He had already erected a handful of crosses in front of the building, something that got him in trouble with a policeman who was passing by that morning.iii He waited patiently for the clock to hit seven thirty, the time when John Britton, the sixty-nine-year-old clinic physician, was scheduled to arrive. Three personages in a blue pickup truck pulled up slowly hoping to gain entrance into the abortion clinic parking lot amid the faint cries of the protestors. Inside were John Britton; his bodyguard, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel James Barrett; and Britton’s wife, June. But Hill was standing in their way. There was a metal object pressed up against his face.

“Get out of the way, Paul Hill,” Barrett implored. “You know us. You know this truck.” iv But Hill would have none of it. The sinister grin planted on his face escaped the notice of everyone except June Britton, who was sitting in the back seat. There were only a few seconds to process the grin before she heard the blasts from the gun. June hit the floor of the truck as the shot continued to ring out. “Oh, my God,” she cried, “he’s shooting.”v

After the gunfire has stopped, June noticed the pool of warm, thick blood forming on the seat in front of her. Her husband and the bodyguard were still sitting upright, but she could sense that at least one of the shots was fatal. Paul Hill had found his target and hit them square in the head. A gaping hole marked the entrance wound that would kill June’s husband. The bodyguard, who had been wearing a bullet-proof vest after concerns over his safety came to light in the March 1993 abortion clinic murder, but that

did not protect him from facing his own untimely death. June was the only survivor of the deadly shooting, suffering from a shot to the left arm.

On the ground lay three spent shotgun shells and the murder weapon, sprinkled with the blown-out glass from the driver’s side window. The calm protestors rose into a frenzy, directing the newly alerted law enforcement officers to the perpetrator. The same officer who had ordered Hill to remove the little crosses just moments earlier was now pointing his service revolver at a subdue and submissive Hill, who crouched down on his knees waiting to be handcuffed. As he was carted off to jail, he flashed a sense of pride as he told the arresting officer, “I know one thing: no innocent babies are going to die today.”vi

Up until a few months ago, Hill had been a man of the cloth. He had been ordained a minister after receiving master’s degree in divinity from the Reformed Theological Seminary in 1984. As a member of the Presbyterian Church of America, he served several congregations. But his views started to turn radical very quickly. At the time he received his education in seminary, there was a popular movement sweeping some of the Christian churches. These ideas, coupled under the umbrella of Theonomy, purported that the laws of God were higher than the laws of man. So, in the case where there was a conflict between what man decreed and God degreed, the well-armed Christian soldier was under obligation to defend the laws of God.

Is it any wonder, then, that one might find a young Paul Hill, standing outside the courthouse where the Michael Griffin trial was under way, carrying a sign that read, “Disobey unjust laws.”vii His congregation was growing increasingly worried about his activism, thinking that he was taking matters into his own hands and himself disobeying the laws of the church. With no other course of action that seemed appropriate, the church elders decided to excommunicate him. He became a man without a pulpit, even though the pulpit was what he appeared to desire the most.

No one would have expected young Paul Hill to ever be a man of the cloth. Friends and acquaintances in those early days described him is very intense; when he set his mind to something, he did it to the nth degree, and then some. If he decided to go into bodybuilding, he focused all his energy on it with little variation. And he appeared to be too caught up in the social movement of the 1960s to be very concerned with religion at all. The drug counterculture, with its dabbling in marijuana and LSD did not escape Hill’s fascination. It was something that led to a many a domestic dispute between his father and him.viii

A year after he was caught with eleven bags of marijuana, he had a moment that changed everything: he had welcomed religion into his life. While in college in 1973, he began saturating himself with the abortion movement. In those days, while at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, he was an active member of the “sidewalk counseling” movement, a strategy that involved waiting at the doorsteps of abortion clinics, attempting to convince women not to have an abortion.

But carrying the mantle of God and defending the unborn began to take on new meaning in the years to come. He felt like other people, who claimed to be Christian, were not doing enough to protect the rights and the sanctity of the unborn. Merely standing in front of the abortion clinic and praying, or singing songs of salvation, or even presenting pregnant women the unsavory details about what

happens to a fetus when an abortion procedure is performed, was not enough. In order the get the attention of the abortion doctors and the women who frequented them, he had to carry his megaphone with him at all times. In short, he had to “mix my blood with the blood of the unborn.” ix

Later, politicians and other officials designated him a domestic terrorist, hell-bent on his own form of religious jihad against those he deemed unworthy to share the same existence with him. His suspected ties to religious extremists organizations, such as the Army of God, didn’t appear to help his case in the eyes of the media and the public, but this did not faze him. Even from behind bars, after he had been sentenced to death by lethal injection for his part in the 1994 murders, he continued to hold true to his beliefs, citing the oft-quoted verses from the Book of John:

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.x

Those who defended his actions, particularly in the AOG, published a statement known as the Second Defensive Action Statement, shortly after Hill committed the murders, in which they declare that Hill’s actions “were morally justified, if they were necessary for the purpose of defending innocent human life.”xi They repeated appealed to lawmakers and the criminal justice system to release Hill and acquit him of the charges against him.

Nearly nine years after he was convicted of killing Dr. John Britton and James Barrett, Hill died by lethal injection at the age of forty-nine. He became the first person in the United States to be executed for the murders at an abortion clinic. Even as he lay in his cell waiting for the moment that his name would be called, and he would have to walk down that long corridor to the room where and handful of onlookers would watch in horror has a doctor administered the lethal concoction of drugs that would stop his heart, he felt no remorse for what he had done. He told one reporter the that he would await his true reward in heaven. Heaven only knows if he ever got it.

i From “Turning from ‘Weapon of the Spirit’ to the Shotgun,” Washington Post, August 7, 1994ii As quoted in “Turning from ‘Weapon of the Spirit’ to the Shotgun.”iii From “Two Killed at Clinic in Florida,” Washington Post, July 30, 1994.iv As quoted in “Turning from ‘Weapon of the Spirit’ to the Shotgun.v Ibid.vi As quoted in “Two Killed at Clinic in Florida.”vii Ibid.viii From “Hill Lives in World of Black and White,” Pensacola News Journal, August 24, 2003.ix From the book by the same name, published posthumously by American Book Publishing Group, 2008x John 12: 24-25; From Biblegateway.com.xi From Wikipedia, Army of God (United States). Retrieved May 28, 2014.