Reality TV can have its downsides, especially when appearing on one lands you in court.
Andrew Hamblin, whose starring role in the recent reality TV show "Snake Salvation" got him in trouble with the law in November, will now have to face a grand jury next month. After a 90-minute preliminary hearing recently at the Campbell County courthouse in Jacksboro, Tenn., a judge decided that Hamblin's citation for illegal possession of dangerous wildlife will go before that jury on Jan. 6.
Hamblin, 22, is a Pentecostal minister who believes that two verses in the New Testament book of Mark mandate that Christians handle serpents in church. He heads one of two families featured on the 16-part series shown by the National Geographic Channel from Sept. 10 through late October. Hamblin's menagerie of several dozen poisonous snakes kept in a locked room at his church in LaFollette, Tenn., was shown multiple times during the "Snake Salvation" series. LaFollette is 33 miles north of Knoxville.
However, Tennessee law forbids the keeping of poisonous reptiles without a permit. Even though pastors like Hamblin aren't allowed to get permits in Tennessee, Campbell County Judge Joe Ayers refused to dismiss charges against Hamblin of illegal possession of wildlife.
"I believe God has his hand on this," Hamblin said afterwards during a press conference on the courthouse steps. "Everything went well. I feel the Lord will intervene."
About two weeks after the series ended, several Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officers showed up at Hamblin's home in LaFollette demanding to know where the snakes were.
"Well, sir, we want to talk," said TWRA Sgt. Joe Durnin to Hamblin, according to a tape of the Nov. 7 visit that was played in court Tuesday afternoon. "You expected us to show up at some point? Well, we've showed up."
According to the tape, Durnin started quizzing Hamblin about "handling snakes" and asked him point-blank if he could see the reptiles. Hamblin excused himself for about 15 minutes, then returned to say the snakes were at an 'undisclosed location.' The officers asked if that location was his church. When Hamblin replied that it was, they asked to accompany Hamblin to the building several miles away. There, Hamblin showed them a locked room with six cases containing 53 copperheads, cottonmouths, timber rattlers and one mangrove snake. Wildlife officials confiscated all the snakes.
As defense attorney Mike Hatmaker cross examined Durnin, the wildlife officer revealed that not only was the conversation on Hamblin's front doorstep being taped, it was also being videoed via a small camera affixed to the front of Durnin's uniform.
"Did he know you were recording him?" Hatmaker asked.
"I don't know," Durnin replied.
"Did you tell him at any time you were taping him?" Hatmaker pressed.
"No sir."
The lawyer eventually got Durnin to state that although he had known that Hamblin had poisonous snakes since early 2013, he and a cadre of other officers only showed up at the pastor's home after "Snake Salvation" ran.
"Why didn't you tell him he had the right to remain silent?" the lawyer asked.
"I didn't know he was in violation [of the law] at that point," Durnin replied. When the attorney asked what made the TWRA suspect Hamblin, "There was all sorts of images on TV," the agent said. "There was all sorts of pictorial evidence."
"I'm stunned," Hatmaker said afterward, "that anytime you talk with the TWRA, you're recorded."
Tennessee wildlife officials have been tangling with serpent handlers for decades. The custom began in 1909 when a Tennessee pastor named George Hensley brought snakes into a church near Chattanooga. In 1947, the state of Tennessee passed a law forbidding serpent handling after several people died from snake bites at church. This case was challenged in 1975 in Swann vs Pack, the Rev. Listor Pack being a Pentecostal minister of a snake-handling church in Newport, Tenn. The state ruled that a lower court judge must "enter an injunction perpetually enjoining and restraining all parties respondent from handling, displaying or exhibiting dangerous and poisonous snakes or from consuming strychnine or any other poisonous substances, within the confines of the State of Tennessee." In addition to handling venomous snakes, serpent handlers often chug down glasses of water mixed with strychnine in the belief that Mark 16:17-18 –the same verse used to justify snake hand ling – also promises divine protection if one drinks poison.
Of the roughly 100 serpent-handling churches spread across Appalachia, the ones in Tennessee have ignored state law. Congregations in Del Rio and Morristown, Tenn., still practice snake handling, according to "Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent Handling Tradition" by Ralph Hood, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Paul Williamson, a professor at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Ark.
The authors said there have been about 100 deaths since 1909 of people handling snakes in churches, but all of them were consenting adults who took up serpents for religious reasons. "There is no documented case of a non-handling member being bitten by a serpent handled by another believer," Williamson and Hood wrote.
Matthew Staver, founder and chairman of the Orlando, Fla.-based Liberty Council, likened the 1947 Tennessee law to a Florida statute that banned animal sacrifice practiced by adherents of the Santeria religion. (A legal challenge to that law: Lukumi Bablu Aye vs City of Hialeah was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993.) A lot depends, he said, on if the Tennessee law targeted a religious practice.
"Saying that religion is causing the problem is problematic," he said. "You might be able to say you can't have people under age 18 within a certain footage or there must a barrier between snakes and the general public. That would be more along the lines of a neutral regulation whether you're doing snake handling for a church service vs handling snakes for a zoo.
"But for the government to say certain practices are causing harm and to ban that particular practice is a violation of the free exercise of religion. You can't just label something harmful without evidence there is real harm. If this has been going on over a century, what kind of harm can they show?"
The state believes harm remains a possibility, said Matthew Cameron, spokesman for the Tennessee Wildlife resources Agency. In an interview last month with the Knoxville News-Sentinel about Hamblin's citation, "We hope to prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and hopefully that will be enough to break him," he said.
"We didn't want to interfere with their religious beliefs, with their religion at all," he added. "This has nothing to do that. We didn't show up on a Sunday and bust him in the middle of church. We were careful to respect their religion but at the same time if your religion is causing a harmful situation, we have to deal with it."
While at the Campbell County courthouse recently, Cameron said that only educational institutions and zoos qualify to keep poisonous reptiles.
A snake container "has to be a cage within a cage with a parameter fence around it guarded 24 hours a day by an expert," he said. The kind of wooden 'snake box' with a glass cover and a simple lock used by serpent-handling churches, he added, "doesn't conform to the law."
When asked if his agency will go after other snake-handling churches in the state if Hamblin is found guilty, he wouldn't say.
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