30 Years After Waco, DOJ Tactics, Overreach Still Issues

Thirty years after a pair of violent confrontations and a controversial 51-day standoff between federal law enforcement and the Branch Davidian Christian sect ended with more than 80 people dead inside of a flaming compound near Waco, Texas, legal experts say the Justice Department appears to have learned few lessons from its involvement in the infamous debacle.

While Nicholas Creel, a political scientist and accounting and business law professor at Georgia College & State University, believes the “disaster that was the Waco siege” was more the result of “objectively terrible strategy” than government overreach, he said the “government’s desire for a big show of force against what they thought to essentially be a heavily armed death cult was criminally stupid.”