
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 7, 1994                   TAG: 9412070117
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PENSACOLA, FLA.                                LENGTH: Medium

ABORTION FOE GETS THE CHAIR

His usual bemused smile wiped off his face, Paul Hill listened with a bored look Tuesday as a judge sentenced him to the electric chair for blowing out the brains of an abortion doctor and his bodyguard.

``May God have mercy on your soul,'' Circuit Judge Frank Bell intoned.

Moments later, an abortion foe shouted that Hill's blood would be on the hands of the judge, the jury and the people of Florida.

Shackled at his feet, the 40-year-old Hill stood impassively in his drab green jail jumpsuit as Bell explained to the former minister why he had rejected the only other sentencing option, life in prison without parole. Last month a jury unanimously recommended that Hill be executed.

Bell recounted the July 29 ambush outside a Pensacola abortion clinic, the second anti-abortion slaying in the Florida Panhandle city. He said Hill paused briefly in the parking lot of the Ladies Center to contemplate the carnage before throwing down his shotgun and calmly walking off.

``The defendant was looking at what he had accomplished with pride and satisfaction,'' the judge said.

Hill, who represented himself with a smile in the state case and a related federal trial but offered no evidence and cross-examined no witnesses, declined to speak at his sentencing.

Hill, a former minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and Orthodox Presbyterian Church, has contended he was justified in killing Dr. John Bayard Britton, 69, and retired Air Force Lt. Col. James Barrett, 74, to prevent abortions. He wasn't allowed to make that argument to jurors, however, because abortion is legal.

Friday, Hill was sentenced to life in prison without parole for violating the new federal clinic-protection law in the shootings. He was the first person convicted under the law, enacted this year.

A federal prosecutor said the death penalty would take precedence.

Bell also sentenced Hill to 13 years and four months in prison for attempting to murder Barrett's 69-year-old wife, June, and for shooting into an occupied vehicle. The unarmed victims were shot as they arrived at the clinic in the Barretts' pickup.

June Barrett, who also is a clinic escort, was wounded and testified at Hill's trial but wasn't at the sentencing.

by CNB