http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/03/05/0305molot... / By David Hanners ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS

Limits sought in Molotov cocktail trial. Prosecutors don't want Austinite McKay's lawyer to ask informant about prior support of arson.

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Prosecutors want to limit what the defense can say about a government informant when Austinite David McKay's bomb-making retrial begins this month.

The U.S. government claims it would be "extremely prejudicial" to let McKay's attorney tell jurors that the informant had once advocated using arson to fight developers who were forcing low-income residents from their neighborhoods, according to a motion filed this week. The government also wants to ask prospective jurors if they have concerns about the use of informants.

The retrial is scheduled to start March 16.

Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Davis declared a mistrial last month after a jury deadlocked on whether McKay, 23, was guilty of making and possessing eight Molotov cocktails during last year's Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Defense lawyer Jeffrey DeGree acknowledged that McKay and his former co-defendant, Bradley Neal Crowder, had built the bombs, but his defense was that a government informant entrapped the men. McKay testified that he would never have built the devices had the informant not urged him to.

Crowder, also 23 and from Austin, pleaded guilty to a single felony count in a plea bargain and is awaiting sentencing. When he entered his guilty plea, he told Davis that he and McKay were the only ones responsible for the Molotov cocktails and that nobody influenced them to build them.

Neither side called Crowder as a witness at McKay's trial.

The government's informant was Brandon Darby of Austin, himself a longtime activist and community organizer. Darby, known for his relief work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, testified that he became a reluctant FBI informant after he became disenchanted with some members of the radical and anarchist community.

Darby was the government's key witness and was also the man the defense tried hardest to discredit. He denied entrapping or influencing McKay to make the Molotov cocktails.

During cross-examination, DeGree made much of the fact that Darby had once advocated using arson against middle- and upper-class buyers who restore run-down neighborhoods and displace low-income residents, a practice known as gentrification.

Darby acknowledged that in the past, he had believed it was OK to resort to arson, although he said he didn't believe in it enough to ever do it himself.

In the new motion, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Paulsen asks to prevent DeGree from referring to Darby's "alleged opinion regarding the appropriateness of using arson to combat gentrification."

"In the first trial, it was established that these views were expressed years before Darby ever met defendant David McKay," Paulsen writes.

Paulsen also wants to stop DeGree from referring to Darby's "alleged possession of a fully automatic firearm." Darby told jurors that when he went to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, he took some of his guns, including a semi-automatic AK-47.