The Head of the Nra Said We Will Own Black People Again

Update: After serving as the National Rifle Clan's general counsel for 17 years, Robert Dowlut retired in late 2014, a few months after this article was published. Neither Dowlut nor the NRA take responded to it.

Shortly before nighttime on the evening of April 17, 1963, Robert J. Dowlut went looking for a gun inside the city cemetery in Due south Curve, Indiana. Making his way through the headstones, he stopped in front of the abandoned Studebaker family mausoleum. He knelt by the front correct corner of the blocky greyness monument and lifted a stone from the damp ground. And so, as ane of the 2 police force detectives accompanying him later testified, the 17-yr-former "used his hands and did some digging." He unearthed a revolver and ammunition. Every bit Dowlut would subsequently tell a judge, the detectives then took the gun, "jammed information technology in my hand," and photographed him. "They were real happy."

Two days earlier, a woman named Anna Marie Yocum had been murdered in her South Bend home. An autopsy determined she had been shot 3 times, once through the chest and twice in the dorsum, likely at close range every bit she'd either fled or fallen downwardly the stairs from her apartment. Two .45-caliber bullets had pierced her heart.

Less than an hour after her body was found, 2 law officers had gone to Dowlut's dwelling house and asked him to help locate Yocum's 16-year-quondam daughter, whom he'd dated. After a brusk, fruitless search, the officers took him to police headquarters. Though Dowlut was booked as a material witness, investigators before long came to suspect that the tall, polite Army individual, home on a two-week exit, had killed Yocum. Afterward a day of intense questioning, Dowlut allegedly broke down and confessed in detail to the murder as well equally to a botched robbery endeavour before the same nighttime in which the possessor of a pawnshop was seriously wounded.

A police photograph shows Robert Dowlut (center) in the South Bend City Cemetery with investigators. Indiana Supreme Court

At get-go, Dowlut insisted that he'd thrown his gun into the St. Joseph River, merely the detectives kept pushing. One officer, Dowlut later testified, "just grabbed me by the shirt, told me that I was a son of a bitch, and that I'd improve show them where the gun was actually at." Non long after, Dowlut told his interrogators that he'd lied: "I said the gun was in the city cemetery." According to i detective, Dowlut reeled off the weapon's serial number from retentiveness.

The gun Dowlut unearthed less than a half mile from the murder scene was a Webley Mark VI, a British-made six-shot military revolver commonly sold in the U.s.a. later World War II. The Indiana Land Constabulary Laboratory determined that information technology had fired a bullet recovered from Yocum's body, one retrieved from her apartment, and another constitute at the pawnshop.

The following morning, Dowlut was charged with get-go-caste murder. A twelvemonth and a half later, a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. Before the judge handed down a life sentence, he asked the defendant if at that place was whatsoever reason why he shouldn't be put away. Dowlut replied, "I am not guilty." A day later, the Indiana State Prison in Michigan Metropolis registered Dowlut, now 19, as prisoner number 33848.

Less than six years later, Robert Dowlut would be a free man—his murder confidence thrown out by the Indiana Supreme Court because of a flawed police force investigation. The court ordered a new trial, merely ane never took identify. Dowlut would return to the Army and go on to earn college and police force degrees. Then he would embark on a career that put him at the epicenter of the move to transform America's gun laws.

Police accused Dowlut (left, in photograph) of murdering his girlfriend's female parent (inset) and wounding a shop owner. Southward Bend Tribune

Today, the 68-year-old Dowlut is the general counsel of the National Rifle Association. Every bit the NRA's peak lawyer, he has been a key architect of the gun lobby's campaign to define the legal interpretation of the Second Amendment. He helped oversee the NRA's effort to strike down Chicago's handgun ban in the 2010 Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, and he is the longtime secretary of the organization's Ceremonious Rights Defense Fund, which has spent millions profitable gun owners in courtroom and sponsoring gun rights researchers. Dowlut'southward journal manufactures have been cited by federal judges and are quoted by pro-gun activists. Chris W. Cox, the executive director of the NRA's lobbying operation, has praised him as "a longtime distinguished Second Subpoena scholar." Dowlut'south backside-the-scenes legal work may have done as much to tighten the NRA's grip on gun policy as its blustery talking heads and provocative PR campaigns.

Among Second Amendment lawyers and scholars, Dowlut is admired for his intellect and at-home. "He is a really reliable and exhaustive source for legal input on the issue," says Robert Levy, the chairman of the Cato Institute'southward board of directors and one of the lawyers behind the landmark 2008 Heller case, in which the Supreme Courtroom affirmed an individual correct to ain guns. Dowlut is "a human encyclopedia" on the subject of land gun laws, says David T. Hardy, a lawyer and prominent pro-gun writer who has known him "longer than I can call back." (Dowlut and current NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre attended Hardy's nuptials in 1982.)

Yet Dowlut maintains an extremely low profile. "Bob is a man who does his chore and doesn't go looking for attention," Hardy says. He rarely speaks in public and does not appear on NRA radio or video programming. While his wife, a lawyer and genealogist, maintains a website with postings on family history, gun rights, and an NRA constabulary seminar she helped organize, Dowlut himself is clearly absent from those pages. He made a rare appearance on the site in a photo—removed a couple of years ago—titled "The Fantasy Supreme Court." The group portrait shows a grin Dowlut, his wife, and a who'southward who of tiptop Second Amendment lawyers and scholars at the NRA annual meeting in 2010. It is captioned: "These are the men who, over a span of more than thirty years, built the foundation that restored the Second Subpoena as an individual right."

The story of how Dowlut walked away from a murder confidence and rose through the ranks of the NRA has never been told publicly. It begins with the transcript of his murder trial, part of a 2,100-page court file obtained by Female parent Jones that includes detailed closed-door testimony not heard by the jury. Despite a series of telephone calls and detailed written requests seeking comment for this article, Dowlut did non reply, nor did his wife. Information technology is unclear whether he has e'er disclosed his past to any colleagues—Hardy told me he had "no idea" near the murder confidence—or to his employer; LaPierre and other NRA leaders likewise did not answer to multiple requests for comment.

Beyond the puzzle of a half-century-erstwhile crime is the question of what drove Dowlut to become one of the brains behind the modern gun rights motility, with its insistence that set admission to guns prevents, rather than provokes, violent crime. Court documents, Dowlut'southward own writings, and interviews with people knowledgeable about his career offer clues to his journey. It spans from the liberated Nazi slave-labor camp where he was born and his troubled youth in Indiana to the chambers of the US Supreme Court—and the forepart lines of the boxing over the right to bear arms.

When Officer Edward M. Scott of the South Bend Law Section pulled up at the house on West Washington Street only before nine:30 p.thou. on April xv, 1963, he establish an elderly woman exterior, screaming, "A lady'southward been shot!"

Anna Marie Yocum as she was establish past the constabulary Indiana Supreme Courtroom

Scott and his partner entered the 3-story Victorian and institute a woman crumpled on the second-flooring landing. "She was lying more or less on her knees in a squat position and her head was hanging downwardly the stairway," Scott recalled at Dowlut's trial. "I noticed there was a large pigsty in her back and there was a pool of nighttime blood all underneath her body." The elderly woman, who had phoned the law, lived across the hall from the victim's small attic apartment merely hadn't seen annihilation.

When the victim was turned over, Scott recognized her every bit Anna Marie Yocum, a 36-year-old waitress and single female parent. 1 afternoon near half-dozen months earlier, he'd escorted Yocum to the hospital to see her teenage daughter, Camille, who'd fainted at a lunch counter. The daughter had been with her boyfriend, Robert Dowlut, who'd told the officer how to find Yocum.

Past run a risk, Scott had spotted Dowlut earlier on the night of the murder. Near xc minutes before they discovered Yocum'due south trunk, he and his partner were dispatched to help investigate the shooting of Saul Berkowitz, the 65-year-old owner of a pawnshop. As the officers stopped at an intersection, Dowlut crossed in front of their motorcar, heading in the direction of Yocum's apartment, two blocks away.

Dowlut was already familiar to the police. In January 1962, according to the Due south Curve Tribune, he had admitted to what a forepart-page article described as a "crime spree": Armed with guns stolen from the local historical society'southward museum, Dowlut and another teenager had robbed a café, netting well-nigh $135. Witnesses at the café said the 2 had brandished a pistol and a bootleg zip gun, firing a shot before emptying the till. (In addition to beingness charged with armed robbery and burglary, Dowlut had faced counts of motorcar theft, hit-and-run, and malicious trespass, according to a 1964 presentencing report.) Brought into juvenile court, the sixteen-year-old reportedly gave no explanation for his behavior and maintained that he'd never and so much as broken a window previously.

Robert Dowlut's high school senior photo Washington Loftier Schoolhouse

After conferring in Polish with Dowlut's parents, refugees who had immigrated after the war, Estimate Frank 10. Kopinski opted for lenience. "My logic tells me yous should be sent away, but my center says no," the judge told Dowlut, according to the Tribune. Dowlut was put on probation and graduated from Washington High School in January 1963 with a expert academic record. At the end of the calendar month, he enlisted in the Regular army and headed off to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for bones training and a fresh beginning.

Respective with his probation officer in March 1963, the young GI sounded hopeful: He was planning to nourish signal school in Georgia and perhaps try out for Airborne and a post overseas. He also indicated that he'd decided non to marry Camille, a prospect that had been weighing on him. She was pregnant merely had recently said he was not the father. "I knew I would be marrying the daughter from mere obligation," he wrote in the letter, which would be read into the record at his murder trial. "I volition go to college every bit soon as I stop my obligation to Uncle Sam," he continued. "I volition be out when I am 20 years old. I will exist more mature and I will have a whole new outlook on life."

Those plans were dashed when Officer Scott and his partner pulled up to the Dowluts' small-scale abode on West Dunham Street. As they collection Robert Dowlut to police headquarters, they passed by the mayhem outside Yocum'southward building. Dowlut asked what had happened. Goose egg, Scott told him. The officer then asked Dowlut what he'd been doing earlier that night. "Well, I have a lot of problems," he recounted Dowlut maxim. The teen said he'd spent much of the evening wandering around by the river. He described the road he'd taken dwelling house, which did not include the intersection where Scott had seen him. "Robert," Scott replied, "you lying to me."

At the station, Dowlut was taken to an interrogation room, where a trio of detectives began questioning him. He recalled that they kickoff asked about Yocum'southward daughter and who she associated with. "They thought that perhaps she did it," he testified. Camille reportedly arrived at her mother'southward flat two hours after the shooting and was taken into "protective custody." The police ended she wasn't involved in the criminal offence. According to the Due south Bend Tribune, the police also detained two other young men for questioning, simply they were permit go. A 38-year-old homo, described during the trial as "friendly" with Yocum, was besides interviewed and released.

Dowlut refused to have a polygraph, and a exam for gunpowder residual on his hands proved inconclusive. Notwithstanding the police force believed they had plenty circumstantial evidence to go along him in custody. Starting time, in that location was his apparent lie nigh his whereabouts. The law likewise had learned that Dowlut had been seeing Camille against her mother's wishes and that he and Yocum disliked each other. There was an bystander written report of a beau in his early 20s, approximately 6 feet tall, running nigh the site of the pawnshop shooting. (Dowlut was vi anxiety tall.) And then there was Dowlut's juvenile tape.

Effectually midnight, Dowlut testified, he asked if he could telephone call a lawyer. Inspector Russell Hunt, the atomic number 82 detective, told him, "No, you can't accept ane; you're under investigation for homicide." (Chase testified that Dowlut never asked for a lawyer.) Dowlut said that when he asked what would happen if he tried to leave, an officer patted his holstered gun and growled, "You damned Polack, you footstep 1 foot out of that door and I'll kill you."

Robert Dowlut shortly before his murder trial, 1964 Indiana Supreme Courtroom

Over the following two and a half days, Dowlut was questioned for a total of nearly xx hours by no fewer than eight police officers. During that time, he did not see a lawyer and was non charged with any offense. His statements were not recorded. At his murder trial, details of his interrogation were revealed behind closed doors by the officers who had arrested and questioned him, and by his parents and Dowlut himself. The jury did not hear these sworn statements, but Dowlut's lawyers submitted them as role of his appeal to the Indiana Supreme Courtroom.

While the chronologies offered by Dowlut and the constabulary closely matched, their accounts of what was said starkly contradicted each other. Co-ordinate to the police, Dowlut was offered multiple chances to contact a lawyer, was treated respectfully, and volunteered his confession. In Dowlut'due south version, he was repeatedly denied access to an attorney and was driven to confess by threats, relentless grilling, and classic good cop-bad cop tactics.

Dowlut's business relationship was corroborated past his male parent, who saw him twice during his detention. Donald Dowlut, who wasn't at home when the law arrested his son, went to visit him at the station a few hours after his abort. "When I saw him, he look tire [sic] and he look like crying…like scared," Donald Dowlut testified in the closed-door hearing. The Dowluts began speaking in Smoothen, only Hunt ordered them to speak English. Donald Dowlut asked if his son needed a lawyer; the officers told him no and that his son would soon exist habitation.

On the night of Apr 16, Robert Dowlut testified, "the police started getting nasty." When police had searched the family's firm before that mean solar day, Donald Dowlut told them that he personally had bought a gun through the mail but had since thrown it in the river. The detectives told Dowlut that his dad might be charged as an accessory subsequently the fact and could go to the electric chair. One officer suggested that Dowlut could avert prosecution by pretending to exist "sick in the head," while another allegedly threatened to "punch me in the kisser." In his testimony, Dowlut referred by name to many of the officers who questioned him—just he said he couldn't remember which ones had physically threatened him.

Co-ordinate to Detective Erwin Hampton, Dowlut broke down and confessed on the afternoon of April 17:

He said that he wanted to ally his girlfriend, Cammie; he said that her mother was against this, didn't like him, was trying to prevent them from seeing one another, and he didn't like Mrs. Yocum. He said he was near due to go dorsum to military camp and that he wanted to accept Cammie with him, merely he needed some money, so he said that he took this gun from his domicile, and I asked him what kind and he said it was a Webley, a .45 Webley. He said that he took the gun and he stuck it in his pants, in his belt, under his jacket, and he said he went uptown looking for a place to rob.

Hampton said that Dowlut besides admitted to shooting Berkowitz accidentally when the pawnshop owner grabbed Dowlut'south gun. He fled, Hampton said, stopping to vomit in the yard of "the retarded schoolhouse" most a block from where Officer Scott saw him. He then walked to Yocum'south building. Hampton asked Dowlut why he went in that location. "I'g verbatim at present," the detective testified. "He said, 'I went there to kill her.'"

The Webley Marking Half-dozen revolver that police said Dowlut dug up in the South Curve City Cemetery Indiana Supreme Court

Inside, Hampton continued, Dowlut institute Yocum watching Television receiver: "When he walked in she looked at him startled-like, and she started to go up and he fired. He went past her, she turned and went towards the door of the apartment. He was at the forepart end of the apartment, and he ran past her and he turned and he fired again at her, and that she roughshod at that fourth dimension."

Dowlut initially told Hampton that he'd thrown the gun and remaining ammunition off a bridge, just he revealed their actual location and the series number of the gun later that afternoon. Hampton too alleged that Dowlut admitted to coaching his dad to lie about the gun when they spoke briefly in Polish at the police station. (Nowhere in the trial transcript is Donald Dowlut asked if the gun was his.) When prosecutor Edward Kalamaros asked about the gun during the airtight-door hearing, Dowlut admitted that he had lied almost throwing it away and that he'd told the police it was in the cemetery.

The police besides tried to squeeze a written confession from Dowlut. He testified that an officeholder dictated a message to his family, telling him to write, "I confess my crimes." Dowlut asked what that meant. "Well, he said, 'You were screwin' this girl, weren't you?' And I told him, 'Yes, I was,' and he said, 'You screwed her more than than in one case, didn't you?' and I said, 'Yep, I did,' and he said, 'Well, those are your crimes, you screwed a minor girl.'" Dowlut said the police also dictated a note to Camille; in it, co-ordinate to Kalamaros, Dowlut said he was "sad for what he had done" and asked her "non to hate him." These notes were not allowed as prove in the trial.

In both Dowlut'southward and the police's accounts, the interrogation reached its climax when Donald Dowlut returned to the station on the evening of Apr 17, afterwards the gun had been retrieved from the cemetery. Dowlut recalled, "I saw him and he saw me and I felt pretty bad about it and I started crying and told Dad that the police made me confess to something that I didn't do." His father described the scene similarly. He said he again asked the police to let his son run into an attorney just was told, "He not need no lawyer because he confess over."

The two police officers present also described a pathetic scene, but remembered what was said entirely differently. Edward Nawrocki, a Polish-speaking officer who knew Donald Dowlut socially, said the father and son spoke "partly [in] Polish and partly in American." He testified that Dowlut tearfully repeated his confession to his dad. When his father asked why he'd shot Yocum, Dowlut "but kept repeatin' that this mother was no good to her, that is, his girlfriend," perhaps hinting at a motive across wanting to run away with Camille. Donald Dowlut as well admitted, in tears, that he had not gotten rid of his gun, Hampton stated. "He said he was pitiful for lying to me, he didn't like to lie, but he was frightened" for his son, the detective said. Hampton too claimed that Dowlut told his dad that hiring an attorney was a waste product of money considering, as Dowlut put it, "I'one thousand going to exist in prison for the rest of my life."

The docket for Robert Dowlut's murder instance St. Joseph County Athenaeum and Records/Dave Gilson

An chaser enlisted past Dowlut'southward father arrived at the station the next morning time to arbitrate in the interrogation. A few hours afterward, Dowlut was arraigned for kickoff-degree murder. Five months shy of his 18th birthday, he was charged as an adult and bond was denied; he pleaded non guilty. Inspector Hunt boasted to reporters almost nifty a instance that had made front-page headlines for two days.

Dowlut was also charged with attack and battery with intent to impale in the Berkowitz shooting; he pleaded not guilty and bail was set up at $100,000. Juvenile court judge Kopinski transferred the case to adult jurisdiction. "If I live to be 100 years your case volition confound me," the dismayed judge, who'd given Dowlut a interruption a year earlier, reportedly said. "I can't fathom your deportment, and I promise and pray that courts some day can obtain the intelligence to predict when a brilliant and talented fellow like you will go awry in life."

Dowlut's attorney, former prosecutor William Plodowski, threw everything he could at his immature, penniless customer's instance. Arguing that pretrial publicity had tainted the jury pool, he got the venue changed to LaGrange Canton, around 50 miles from Due south Bend. More importantly, Plodowski insisted that Dowlut's abort and interrogation had violated his constitutional rights to counsel and confronting self-incrimination, arguing that all evidence produced from his detention should have been inadmissible.

Post-obit the closed-door hearing on this motion, Judge Winslow Van Horne agreed that Dowlut's warrantless arrest had been improper merely did not agree that he had been coerced into confessing. However, Van Horne ruled that the police conduct plus the defendant's youth required the courtroom to disregard any statements obtained during his detention. As a result, the jury would not hear anything about Dowlut'southward interrogation and alleged confession. Jurors would be allowed to hear about the gun Dowlut dug upward—only not how the constabulary came to locate information technology in the cemetery.

On the same day that the judge suppressed his confession, Dowlut filed a written alibi stating that he had spent all of April 15, 1963, at dwelling, except for a short trip to a nearby store "to purchase chewing gum." A friend of his father'south testified that he had seen Dowlut at habitation about a one-half-hour before the pawnshop robbery. Plodowski also cast dubiousness on the thought that his client could have committed the murder, hid the gun, and gotten home by the time the police force came looking for him.

The prosecution'southward case rested largely on Officer Scott'south sighting of the suspect, the trip to the cemetery, the gun and bullets, and a jailhouse informant who claimed Dowlut had admitted everything to him. Berkowitz as well took the stand, describing how Dowlut had entered his shop, asked to see a guitar, and so "took out his gun, put information technology to my tummy, and pulled the trigger." Camille testified that a few days earlier her mother was shot, she saw Dowlut, who told her, "If you committed robbery in South Bend…you could go away with it." She said that he had called her mom a "bitch" and that he wanted her to come with him when his leave concluded. She said she didn't want to, and "my mother wouldn't have let me."

In November 1964, a jury found Dowlut guilty of 2d-caste murder. (The article incorrectly states Anna Marie Yocum's age; she was 36 when she died.) Logansport Pharos-Tribune

At 1:05 a.yard. on Nov 3, 1964, subsequently deliberating for more than eight hours, the jury found Dowlut guilty of 2d-degree murder. A calendar week later he was sentenced and put in prison. He appealed, but was denied a new trial. In early 1965, the Indiana Supreme Court agreed to review his case, and on April 1, 1968, it handed down its ruling in Dowlut 5. Country. The trial judge had properly rejected Dowlut'south "illegal confessions," Justice Amos Jackson wrote on behalf of the four-justice majority, but he had improperly admitted the "poisoned fruit" of the interrogation: the gun in the graveyard.

The court reversed Dowlut'south conviction and ordered that he be retried. The decision echoed the Usa Supreme Court'south ruling in Miranda v. Arizona nearly two years earlier, which had affirmed criminal defendants' right against self-incrimination during police questioning. A 1978 commodity in the Indiana Police Review criticized the Miranda and Dowlut rulings for invalidating otherwise reliable corroborating evidence, such as the gun in Dowlut's trial: "The doubtable's noesis of where the murder weapon was hidden was conclusive proof that he had knowledge of the murder."

The land supreme court's decision left virtually no admissible show, and the try to retry Dowlut for Yocum's murder was eventually dropped. A week after the loftier court ruling, he was released into the custody of St. Joseph County, where he faced new charges for wounding Berkowitz. After two more years of venue changes and delays, the remaining charges confronting Dowlut were dismissed due to the state'southward failure to provide a speedy trial. On April iii, 1970, Dowlut received another chance to start over. Sam Mirkin, a now-retired public defender who represented Dowlut at the end of these proceedings, recalls the day his client was released: "Mr. Dowlut said, 'What practise I do now?' I said, 'You phone call your father and have him pick you upwards.'"

Following his legal odyssey, Dowlut returned to the war machine. Co-ordinate to his official bio, he joined the 82nd Airborne Division, and and so served with the Ground forces Reserve's twelfth Special Forces while he attended Indiana University-South Curve. (His bio says he was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant.) Known equally "Necessity U," the small campus drew students who "likely would have had no hazard for a higher teaching," as Dowlut's married woman, Alice Marie Beard, later recalled. Dowlut tried to recruit fellow vets to come to IUSB. As the 28-twelvemonth-old told Bristles for an article she wrote in the student newspaper in Apr 1974, "I try to impress upon them that I had been out of loftier school for nine years and that my parents were working-form people, merely that I'm making information technology okay in college."

At Indiana University-Southward Curve, Dowlut (heart) became active in the veterans movement. Indiana University-South Bend Archives

He joined the paper's staff and wrote a series of columns on veterans' affairs, providing advice on everything from obtaining GI Neb benefits to removing negative or embarrassing details from discharge papers. His writing, which ran aslope columns such as "Pigs Are Pigs" (virtually a student'south run-in with the South Bend cops) and anti-Army ads ("Our all-time killers have been guys just similar you lot" ), took a practical, fifty-fifty lawyerly, tone. Less than a year later he was interviewed by Bristles, they married.

Afterward graduating in 1975, Dowlut enrolled at Howard University Schoolhouse of Law. It was at the historically blackness school that Dowlut came to meet gun rights as a civil rights result, according to Robert Cottrol, a professor of law at George Washington University and a member of the Ceremonious Rights Defence force Fund board of trustees who is friends with Dowlut. He graduated in 1979 and was admitted to the DC Bar in 1980. Past this time he had started working at the NRA.

Dowlut joined the organization just as it was being reborn. In what became known as the Cincinnati Revolt, hardliners had overthrown the NRA's moderate leadership and installed Harlon Carter as executive vice president in 1977. Under Carter, the NRA adopted uncompromising rhetoric and an aggressive political strategy that turned it into ane of the nation'due south near powerful interest groups. Carter also envisioned recruiting "young men and women—lawyers, constitutional scholars, writers, historians, professors—who some day will be old and gray and wise, widely published and highly respected. It will be those individuals—in the future—who will provide the means to save the Second Subpoena."

Dowlut became a key player among this new generation of under-the-radar activists, doing everything from representing the plaintiff in a 1984 lawsuit challenging the nation's first municipal handgun ban to alarm housing authorities that prohibitions on tenants owning guns are unconstitutional. He has written or cowritten more than 25 amicus briefs on behalf of the NRA in country and federal cases, including a 1997 Supreme Court case aimed at striking down the Brady Law, which requires federal background checks on gun buyers. At a legal forum at the 1989 NRA convention, he warned that "the end goal of the gun prohibitionists is to ban all guns," calculation that "because of the inability of parents to instill values in youth" more restrictions were "being placed on the backs of gun owners."

Dowlut has likewise helped fulfill Carter'due south vision of reshaping Second Subpoena jurisprudence from outside the courtroom. In the tardily 1970s, a pocket-size core of law professors and lawyers began arguing that virtually judges—including generations of Supreme Court justices—had gotten gun rights all wrong. In its kickoff 200 years, the Supreme Court had considered simply four Second Amendment cases; it had never affirmed an individual right to comport arms beyond the context of militia service. The only 20th-century case was in 1939, when the justices unanimously ruled confronting two men who claimed the federal prohibition on transporting unregistered sawed-off shotguns violated their Second Amendment rights. The new wave of pro-gun scholarship by Dowlut and his allies declared that this legal consensus was non only wrong merely dangerous: The Second Amendment needed to be rescued from gun-antisocial judges, politicians, and activists.

In 2012, the NRA observed Dowlut's 35 years of service with the organization. Civil Rights Defense Fund/Facebook

Dowlut'due south first manufactures on gun rights appeared in the early 1980s. A piece in the Oklahoma Law Review in 1983 laid out the basic premise of the modernistic gun rights movement: Beyond the awkward and archaic preamble about a "well-regulated militia," the Second Amendment unequivocally secures a wide individual correct to keep firearms for self-defense and "to deter governmental oppression." Equally Dowlut wrote, "Draconian gun laws are an ugly class of repression frequently cloaked in liberal trappings."

Dowlut'due south piece was ane shot in a sudden volley of pro-gun scholarship. According to an analysis by political scientist Robert J. Spitzer, between 1912 and 1969, but three law periodical articles endorsed this expansive view of the Second Amendment. Betwixt 1970 and 1989, 27 did, while 25 supported the prevalent court interpretation. By the 1990s, articles supporting the broader interpretation outnumbered those espousing the traditional view 2 to ane; 27 were written by vii authors who had worked for the NRA or other pro-gun groups, including Dowlut, who wrote iii.

In 1997, Dowlut published his most forceful and sweeping article yet in the Stanford Law & Policy Review, justifying the Clinton-era militia movement and predicting that the Supreme Court would eventually strike a blow against the "discrimination, political correctness, and federal courts who give [Americans'] Second Subpoena rights no respect." That aforementioned twelvemonth, ruling on the Brady Police example, Supreme Courtroom Justice Clarence Thomas noted the "growing torso of scholarly commentary" that had "marshal[ed] an impressive array of historical evidence," and hinted at his eagerness to hear a Second Amendment instance. Justice Antonin Scalia, in his 1998 book, A Matter of Interpretation, stated that "dispassionate scholarship" suggested at that place was a personal right to keep and bear arms. The revisionist view of the Second Amendment had gone mainstream.

Otis McDonald outside the Supreme Court subsequently information technology heard oral arguments in his challenge to Chicago'south handgun ban. Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP

Dowlut has also spent decades helping build the NRA'southward Civil Rights Defense Fund (originally the Firearms Ceremonious Rights Legal Defense Fund), a nonprofit founded in 1978 to establish legal precedents strengthening Second Subpoena rights. Information technology has recently backed cases in 35 states and Washington, DC, involving a range of bug from self-defense claims and assault weapons bans to the court-martial of a US soldier charged with murdering an Iraqi detainee. In 1996, it contributed $20,000 to the defense force of Bernhard Goetz, who was sued by one of the men he had shot and wounded in the New York Metropolis subway in 1984. In 2010, the fund awarded Sen. Ted Cruz its Harlon B. Carter-George S. Knight Liberty Fund laurels for his work in support of Heller and McDonald as Texas' solicitor full general. Since the late 1990s, the fund has given roughly $ii.5 million to pro-gun researchers; Hardy, for instance, has received at least $467,000 for various projects, including a documentary moving-picture show.

Dowlut got to witness the culmination of his work on March 2, 2010. Dressed in an Airborne-maroon beret, scarf, and overcoat, he stood in the brisk darkness outside the Supreme Court equally his wife handed out cookies to court watchers waiting in line. The Supreme Court was virtually to hear oral arguments in McDonald v. Chicago, its second gun rights case in every bit many years.ⁱ

Immediately after the 2008 Heller ruling, in which the court had struck down Washington, DC'south strict handgun regulations, the NRA contested Chicago's 1982 handgun ban. The finding from Heller—that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual correct to keep arms for cocky-defense force—did not apply only to the capital, the NRA argued, but to the nation equally a whole. Its case became part of McDonald five. Chicago, whose lead plaintiff was Otis McDonald, a retired African American maintenance engineer who had sought to buy a gun for self-defence force. On June 28, 2010, the court reaffirmed its earlier ruling, 5-4. Together, these decisions emboldened the gun rights movement, setting off a surge of new challenges to local and country laws.

Writing for the majority in McDonald, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment practical to u.s., echoing an argument that Dowlut and his colleagues had been making for nearly thirty years. In their opinions, the majority cited NRA legal fund trustee Cottrol, as well as legal fund recipients Hardy and Stephen Halbrook. Though Dowlut was not mentioned by name, his influence could be seen between the lines. A popular gun rights blogger wrote, "We likewise should not overlook the work of NRA General Counsel himself, Bob Dowlut, whose work on this issue goes back to the '70s."

Dowlut has helped realize Harlon Carter'south vision of venerable scholars sitting atop an enduring legal foundation. Yet his story evokes Carter's legacy in some other way: In 1931, when Carter was 17, he was convicted of confronting, shooting, and killing a 15-year-old Mexican American boy in his hometown of Laredo, Texas. Carter'south conviction was afterwards overturned on grounds that the estimate had not adequately instructed the jury on the law of cocky-defense. The managing editor of the Laredo Times, which uncovered Carter's past, noted, "When Carter applied for his job with the NRA I doubtfulness whether he told them he had killed a human being." When the incident was reported in 1981, the then-NRA head get-go denied it, but came to acknowledge it. Asked about the case in 1984, Carter said, "It hasn't hurt me with the American people. It still comes up every now and then but it will never take whatsoever effect. That was almost 53 years agone."

The abandoned Studebaker family mausoleum in S Bend's city cemetery, February 2014. Dave Gilson

Information technology is all but incommunicable to know exactly what happened on that dark in South Curve more than 50 years ago. The South Bend Police Department has Yocum'due south murder classified as an open up case. Near everyone involved in Robert Dowlut's trial—the gauge, lawyers, police officers, and other witnesses—is dead. Camille left South Bend; documents indicate she married the human described during the trial as having been "friendly" with her mother. He died in 1996. Reached by phone, Camille hung up when asked to comment for this story. A registered letter sent to her address was refused 3 times.

For now, a stack of grainy court documents contains the most detailed account of this grueling chapter of Dowlut's life. The pages concur hints of an fifty-fifty more complex story, such equally the moment when, according to Detective Hampton's account of Dowlut's interrogation, the teen turned philosophical: "He leaned back in his chair and he said, 'Well, you know, Sergeant, information technology's just like a person is two people.' And I said, 'What do you lot mean by that?' and he said, 'Well, if one role of me can love and the other part can impale.'"

Without hearing from Dowlut himself, information technology's as well difficult to know exactly how his experience as a criminal accused influenced his work. Nonetheless information technology seems clear that it combined with memories of his family'south painful past to shape his views of regime authority and the need to possess guns.

Dowlut's parents grew up in eastern Poland, in what is now Belarus. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Donald (originally named Dyonizy), Olga, and their infant son, Victor, were sent to Dachau with other non-Jewish Poles. The Dowluts were later taken to Augsburg, a slave-labor camp outside Munich that made armaments. In that location the baby became sick. Every bit Alice Bristles explained in an online family history, "A Nazi physician told Olga to hold her baby as Dyonizy watched. The medico gave Victor an injection; the baby began convulsing immediately and died."

Robert was born in Augsburg in September 1945, less than five months after the US Army liberated it and converted it to a refugee camp. He was originally named Bogdan, significant "given by God." In 1949, the family emigrated to Wisconsin, and then South Curve. Donald did transmission labor, and Olga worked in the deli at Notre Dame University. (Olga Dowlut died in 1972. Donald Dowlut died in 1989; the South Bend Tribune reported that the coroner adamant that the 75-year-one-time had shot himself in the head.)

During the murder trial, Dowlut'southward attorney drew on the family's tragic history to undermine the police's claims that his client had confessed voluntarily. He presented prove that Dowlut had grown up with an intense fear of armed men in uniform due to his parents' wartime experience. During his airtight-door testimony, Dowlut said their accounts of Nazi camp guards "fabricated me frightened of police officers." He as well said that he'd read news articles about police brutality in the Us: "Mostly they have to do with civil rights. They said that police used clubs, fire hoses, police dogs."

Sometime NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman, who first met Dowlut in the mid-'80s, says that Dowlut drew a connexion between his past and his passion for the Second Amendment: "My recollection was that his parents grew upwardly in a totalitarian society and he saw the gun as an expression of the liberty given to Americans." This resonates with one of the key tenets of contemporary gun rights rhetoric, that the framers of the Constitution saw the correct to bear arms every bit a barrier confronting tyranny.

Dowlut's writings as well express skepticism about the government's power to protect citizens and their rights, including those of the accused. In his 1997 commodity in the Stanford Law & Policy Review, he wrote, "Historically the constabulary take opposed whatsoever extension of constitutional rights to individuals under their control." In his 1983 commodity, he cited the Supreme Court'due south affirmation in Miranda of "the right to remain silent and have counsel nowadays during a custodial interrogation." He disapprovingly quoted Justice Byron White'due south dissent, which predicted that the ruling "volition render a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets." ²

The Second Amendment, Dowlut has argued, must be viewed in this context. Similar the criminal suspect's right against cocky-incrimination, the ordinary denizen'due south right to bear arms is a fundamental protection against authorities overreach.

Dowlut is adamant that guns do not facilitate law-breaking or enable tearing criminals. In his Stanford article, he quoted a study on gun ownership that asserted, "It perhaps goes without proverb that the 'average' gun possessor and the 'average' criminal are worlds apart in background, social outlooks, and economic circumstances. The idea that mutual, ordinary citizens are somehow transformed into potential perpetrators of criminally violent acts once they have acquired a firearm seems farfetched, near of all since there is substantial prove that the typical gun owner is flush, Protestant, and middle-class."

There is a clear, bright line betwixt law-abiding gun owners and criminals, Dowlut holds: "Those who fence that a significant share of serious violence is perpetrated by previously irenic 'average Joes' are clinging to a myth." Only a criminal, not a gun, tin turn a moment of anger or panic into a tragedy. Past this reasoning, the good need never apologize—and the bad are beyond redemption.

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Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/robert-dowlut-nra-murder-mystery/

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