Shanti Badra shown Mercy by US Judge

The former Australian sannyasin Shanti Badra has avoided jail after pleading guilty to being an active participant in a plot to kill the US district attorney, Charles Turner in 1985. In fact she volunteered, according to reports, to be the one who was to commit the murder.

Shanti Badra, also known as Catherine Jane Stork, aged 60, was sentenced this week to five years' probation after surrendering to US police last September. She had voluntarily returned from Germany to face the charges.

Shanti Badra was a former University of Western Australia lecturer and was the last of seven people to be convicted for the 1985 attempted murder.

Judge Malcolm Marsh said Catherine Stork (her legal name) who was facing life in prison, had convinced him she "has seen the error of her ways". "I think there are times where justice trumps mercy," he said. "There are other times when mercy trumps justice ... we have such a case here."

But the sentence, allowing Stork to return last night to Frankfurt, her home since fleeing the US in 1989, has angered her intended target.

Charles Turner told The Australian newspaper he had a "different view" of what should have happened to Stork and her co-conspirators.

The other conspirators,, progressively caught and convicted over the past two decades, were previously given prison terms ranging from two to five years.

"This was a lying-in-wait conspiracy to murder me, a presidential appointee, and for a long time I slept with a loaded gun beside my bed," Mr Turner said.

Stork offered to give herself up to the US authorities only after learning that one of her two children, Peter Lalor, 36, had a terminal brain tumour, and therre were apparently considerable negotiations with the US authorities that went on prior to her surrender.

Her US-based lawyer Philip Lewis said she wanted to clear up the charges to enable her to visit her son.

"She was allowed to visit her son in November," he said, before returning to face the Court this month.

Prosecutors alleged Ma Anand Sheela and her gang of whom Shanti Badra was a leading member, and who then administered the temporal affairs of the Osho commune, planned to gun down Mr Turner after he was appointed to head an investigation into the affairs of the Commune, near Antelope, in Oregon, in 1985.

The probe Turner headed was focused on so-called sham marriages intended to circumvent immigration requirements on foreigners, wiretapping in the commune, and an intentional salmonella poisoning of a nearby town intended to stop people voting in a local election.

In May 1985, Sheela called a meeting of selected aides to form a hit squad to plot Mr Turner's assassination, and also, most disturbingly of all, to kill several fellow sannyasins who were deemed dissidents, or rivals to temporal power within Oshos household in the commune.

Shanti Badra volunteered to be the killer of CharlesTurner, buying guns and silencers and stalking him.

"I actually conspired to kill Mr Turner - it is up to me alone to face this terrible truth," she told the court. "No person has the right to do what I did."

Previously In 1986, Shanti Badra was convicted, and served almost three years in jail for the additional attempted murder of Amrito, Oshos personal physician.

FBI agents uncovered the plot to kill Mr Turner after her release for that offence, but she had already fled to Germany, where she had remarried her previous husband, Hans-Georg Stork.

In Pune, India where he now lives, Amrito said that he was glad the whole issue was now over.

Whilst these events are now 21 years old, the whole almost surreal episode in sannyas between 1983 and 1985 has the most important and serious lessons. Just because of the distance of time, they should not be ignored. One lesson seems preeminent, that is however well founded and built on love a commune might be, once its size becomes large, temporal power and politics always intercede even in an organization devoted to the pursuit of the experience of God, or as Osho once said of the Oregon Ranch, an experiment to provoke God.
Parmartha (Editor: sannyasnews.com)

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