Snyder-Phelps fight has many twists, turns - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Snyder-Phelps fight has many twists, turns

YORK, Pa. — Albert Snyder’s eyes well up with tears when recalling his son’s funeral.

More than 1,200 people packed St. John Catholic Church in Westminster, Md., on March 10, 2006, to pay their respects to 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who died when his Humvee rolled over in Iraq’s Anbar province while he manned the vehicle’s gun turret.

On their trip from the church to a nearby veterans cemetery, small-town patriotism was on full display. Cars pulled over and allowed the funeral procession to pass. Strangers on the street saluted.

“I’ve never seen a funeral like this in my life,” the father said during an interview in his hometown, his voice wavering. “It was just amazing to see.”

The funeral was marred, however, by seven uninvited guests — members of the Westboro Baptist Church flew in from their headquarters in Topeka, Kan., to picket outside the church service.

Carrying signs reading “Semper Fi Fags,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “Thank God for IEDs,” the group infuriated passersby and mourners — just as its members have at hundreds of military funerals across the country before and since.

Led by founder Fred Phelps, the group maintains that God kills U.S. troops as punishment for the country’s tolerance of homosexuality, greed and abortion.

Snyder wasn’t going to take that lying down.

Four years after his son’s death, this modest automation equipment salesman and a small team of lawyers are taking their case all the way to the Supreme Court, where they will argue that Phelps’ right to free speech does not supersede mourners’ rights to lay their family members to rest without facing an insulting public protest. He is seeking $5 million in emotional and punitive damages from Westboro Baptist and members of the Phelps family, and hopes that a legal victory will spare others the torment he and hundreds of other military families have been forced to endure.

The court, which takes only one in a hundred cases it’s asked to consider, agreed in March to hear the case. Arguments are scheduled to begin in October.

“I knew these people were going to be at Matt’s funeral, but in my mind, this day was about Matt, and that’s strictly what it was about,” Snyder said. “People think that these were seven people who showed up with little signs. There were people flipping them the finger, yelling at them from cars. And this is the way you’re going to bury someone who died for their country?”

Fighting back

Snyder’s fight started almost immediately. On June 5, 2006, three months after his son’s death, Snyder sued the Westboro church for defamation, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

His suit charged that a screed against the Snyders posted on one of the church’s Web sites was defamatory. Titled “The Burden of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder,” the rant accused his parents of raising their son “for the devil.” It also accused them of teaching him to commit adultery and divorce and to “support the largest pedophile machine in the history of the entire world, the Roman Catholic monstrosity.”

The suit also claimed that the Westboro group invaded the Snyders’ privacy because its members “intentionally entered upon the solitude and seclusion of the plaintiff and his family members,” and “intruded upon the plaintiff’s private affairs and concerns.”

Finally, the suit argued that the church meant to harm Snyder’s family emotionally.

The suit did not ask for a specific amount of money, but said the Westboro group should have to pay both emotional damages, Snyder’s court costs and punitive damages for their “reprehensible actions.”

Snyder wrestled with the decision to bring suit, he said. It required him to endure hours of medical and psychiatric testing, to validate claims he had been harmed by the protests. His doctors later said his diabetes and depression worsened after he found the screed against him and his family on the church’s Web site.

“I thought about it and about what they did to me, and how Matt would have felt if somebody had done this to one of his brothers from Iraq,” he said. “And I decided, ‘I’m going to go through with this.’ ”

The church sought to squash the lawsuit, arguing during a trial in Baltimore in October 2007 that its members did not intend to cause emotional distress. Their protest was kept 1,000 feet away from the church’s doors, they pointed out. They needed to preach to “doomed America” in public places to let it be known the acceptance of homosexuality is wrong, they said.

The jury didn’t buy their argument. On Oct. 31, 2007, it found in Snyder’s favor, awarding him $10.9 million in damages — enough to effectively bankrupt the 70-member church. Snyder conducted dozens of media interviews that week, reflecting on the way he had once been pushed around by many people in his life, only to latch on to the church’s actions and stand up for himself.

‘An insult’

The Westboro group immediately appealed the decision, and legal experts and scholars wondered aloud whether the case could stand up before a higher court.

In February 2008, a federal judge in Baltimore decided to reduce the damages to $5 million. The church tried to get the Supreme Court to take the case, but it declined, so their next appeal went to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va.

That court overturned the original decision, with a three-judge panel ruling the Phelps family’s signs and Internet criticism of the Snyders was protected as free speech under the First Amendment, even if the discourse was “repugnant.”

“As utterly distasteful as these signs are, they involve matters of public concern, including the issue of homosexuals in the military, the sex-abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, and the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens,” Judge Robert King wrote in the court’s opinion.

Snyder struggled with his next step, too.

In an interview, Snyder said balancing the legal battle, interview requests and day-to-day life has been overwhelming at times. He was recently saddled with $16,510 in legal fees for the Phelpses’ appeal in Richmond, and has accrued more than $50,000 in legal bills overall, even though his attorneys do not charge him for their time.

He launched a Web site to help collect money for the fight, but is “still a long way off” from paying for everything — especially because the Supreme Court fight will take at least $20,000 more. Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly agreed March 30 to cover the $16,510 for the Phelpses’ appeal while blasting the court’s decision to make Snyder pay it.

“I don’t want to take anyone’s free speech away,” Snyder said. “But I don’t want anybody to do anything to the people who gave us that free speech. Too many people have died to protect it, and for someone to hide behind it and abuse it is an insult.”

Legal experts are uncertain how the case will play out. They question whether the court will rule in favor of Snyder if it means the right to free speech will be limited in any way. Yet the Supreme Court’s willingness to take up the case has raised plenty of questions about what it could do.

One possibility is that the court wants to establish a clear definition of the emotional distress tort, a body of laws that address how behavior that results in extreme emotional distress should be handled in the justice system, said Eugene Volokh, an expert on free speech and religious freedom laws at the University of California, Los Angeles.

One famous case that addressed emotional distress, Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell, is referenced specifically in Snyder’s request to the Supreme Court. In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled that Jerry Falwell, a nationally known televangelist, could not collect emotional damages from the publication for printing a fictional parody that described him having a drunken sexual encounter with his mother in an outhouse.

Since Falwell was a well-known public figure, the burden was on him to prove Hustler specifically meant to cause him harm. Snyder’s lawyers question whether the same principle should apply to the grieving father of a fallen Marine.

Hard feelings

At the other end of the legal proceedings is the Phelps family, which has challenged state laws limiting picketing at funerals in the past. They are unapologetic for their actions and remain antagonistic toward the military.

In an interview, Shirley Phelps-Roper, a lawyer and one of the seven picketing outside Lance Cpl. Snyder’s funeral, said the destruction of the world is imminent, and the military won’t be able to save it. In fact, she says they’ll turn into cowards.

“At the front of the pack is going to be those military brutes,” she said. “They’re young and strong and can outrun the rest of the rebels. And they’re [not] going to give a hoot” about everyone else.

She then took a direct swipe at Marines: “It ain’t going to be about the badass Marine because first, they’re not badass. They think they’re badass. If they’re so badass, how come they keep getting killed?”

The Westboro group cannot picket every funeral due to the church’s small size, so it “relies on God” for guidance, she said. Each month, the group announces a schedule of events they plan to picket, and swaps gears to attend other events if something with a higher profile presents itself as an option.

One example: In February, the Phelps family decided to picket for three days outside a conference in Southern Virginia held by the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, a Defense Department organization launched to develop technology and tactics to defeat roadside bombs. But they pulled away when they realized they could picket outside the Johnstown, Pa., funeral of Rep. John Murtha, D.-Pa.

“We said instead of going back over to the JIEDDO conference, we’ll kick that piece to the curb and instead picket Murtha, because he, after all, is a dead soldier,” Phelps-Roper said.

Murtha, by the way, was a Marine.

Snyder acknowledges that, because of the distance the Phelpses were required by police to keep from his son’s funeral, he didn’t see the signs they carried that day until he turned on the television later. But it isn’t fair that the Phelpses’ actions forced him to worry about what his daughters might see when he should have been allowed to simply mourn and observe the loss of his son, he said.

“They’re really just sick people,” Snyder said of the Phelps family. “They came to my church. I didn’t go to theirs. They came from Kansas with a specific purpose, and that was to get their message out. And they didn’t care who it hurt.”

Snyder v. Phelps

Albert Snyder’s lawyers have asked the Supreme Court to review three major topics in his case against the Westboro Baptist Church. There’s no guarantee the court will address all three, but the questions are worth considering when assessing possible outcomes, legal experts said. Topics they could review:

• Speech and privacy. Snyder asked the Supreme Court to review whether the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., was correct in protecting the church’s speech if it attacked a “private” figure, Snyder, concerning a private matter, the funeral. The Phelpses argued to the court that there is a “viable basis” to saying Snyder is not a private figure with regard to his son’s death because he had already granted media interviews. The church also said its protests are focused on public issues, making them protected speech.

• Speech and religion. Snyder asked the court to review whether the First Amendment, used to overturn Snyder’s initial settlement, allows the Phelpses’ freedom of speech to trump Snyder’s right to mourn his son in a private religious ceremony. The church has countered by saying its members picketed on a public street, on issues that were of public interest.

• Funeral attendees’ rights. Snyder’s lawyers say that even if the appellate court’s decision to uphold the Phelpses’ free speech was appropriate, it failed to consider that Snyder was a “captive audience” at his son’s funeral. A federal appeals court already has ruled in another case involving the church that the government is allowed to protect private citizens from unwanted communication when they cannot avoid it, Snyder points out. The Phelpses say the argument is not relevant, since the previous case focused on whether a state law banning picketing within 300 feet of a funeral was constitutional — a separate issue.

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