The six defendants, full of fight and fervor only moments before, seemed to droop visibly when the jury returned its verdict: Guilty on all 14 counts of trespassing.
It had been, for them, a long and frustrating day. The verdict was no surprise. Neither was the speed with which the jury reached its decision-just 13 minutes. But the defendants, arrested at protests last August at a U.S. Navy communications installation in the woods of upper Wisconsin, had expected to have their say in court.
They never got the chance.
Instead, lawyerless, they were reduced to trying-awkwardly, inexpertly-to sneak information about what they did and why they did it into their testimony.
“I have to tell the jury,” said Charles Carney at one point on the witness stand, “that I’m a little frustrated that I can’t tell the jury why I was there.”
Judge Robert Eaton of the Ashland County Circuit Court stopped Carney short. If Carney disagreed with Eaton’s decisions about what the jury could and couldn’t be told, he could raise the issue later with the state court of appeals.
“You can’t take it up with the jury,” Eaton said.
And that was that.
Five of the defendants were from the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, and they felt thwarted by Eaton at every turn of the trial.
They had gone last summer to the Navy communications facility in Chequamegon National Forest in the town of Shanagolden, some 350 miles north of Chicago, to assert the immorality of nuclear weapons and the U.S. policies for using them.
And they had driven in mid-December even further north to Ashland-on the shore of Lake Superior, at the very edge of the nation-to stand trial and use the courtroom as a public forum, small and remote as it was, in which to air their beliefs.
They had gone knowing the likelihood of their conviction, and the possibility that they might be sent to jail.
That they were convicted without having their say was a bitter pill to swallow. Yet, their defeat was not unalloyed.
In their innocent way, they twisted and shifted the normal trial routines as few defendants ever can. Unhampered by an attorney, they talked directly to the judge, often naively-or not so naively-breaking the rules of courtroom etiquette. They strolled back and forth in front of the bench while cross-examining witnesses and one another.
At one point, Assistant District Attorney Ruth Bachman needed to move a board listing the defendants and their charges, and it was defendant Katey Feit who got up from the defense table to help her.
Later, when Feit was in the witness chair testifying on her own behalf, she turned away from the judge and the counsel tables to face the jury members directly, and, with her hands on her lap, she talked to them, as if they were all in someone’s living room, about what she did.
Indeed, by the end of the day-long trial, the courtroom belonged as much to the defendants as it did to Eaton and Bachman.
And their message, for all the judge’s rulings, was not totally muted. The 12 women of the jury still heard bits and pieces of what the defendants wanted to say.
And, the next morning, the people of Ashland County found the entire top of page one and more than half of another page in The Daily Press devoted to the defendants and their trial.
On Aug. 6, 1945, at the end of World War II, an American air crew dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki was the target of a second bomb. The two bombs killed as many as a quarter of a million people.
Last summer, to commemorate the 49th anniversary of the bombings and to bring attention to their opposition to American military policies, some 50 anti-nuclear activists gathered in a clearing in the Chequamegon National Forest and set up a small tent village that they named Shadows on the Rock Peace Camp.
The name referred to outlines, like shadows, that people cast onto sidewalks, streets and the sides of buildings when their bodies were vaporized by the bombs dropped on Japan.
The ELF Project
A couple of hundred yards down a forest roadway was the entrance to one of two transmitters in the U.S. Navy’s Extremely Low Frequency Communications System, also known as the ELF Project, for communicating with deeply submerged Trident submarines.
The ELF Project, which also has a site in Michigan, has been controversial since it was first announced in 1969. Proponents contend that it’s needed as a means of reaching the Tridents at extreme depths under the sea where more conventional methods of communication are useless.
But those opposed argue that electromagnetic radiation from the ELF transmitters represents a health hazard to people and wildlife. And they believe that the main purpose of ELF is to give the order to the Tridents to fire their nuclear missles in a first-strike American attack-i.e., an attack that’s not in retaliation to an enemy’s initial nuclear assault.
The ELF facility in Shanagolden has been the site of dozens of peaceful demonstrations since it opened in 1986. Hundreds of protesters, most of them belonging to Wisconsin-based environmental and anti-nuclear groups, have been arrested over the years on trespass charges, and more than 30 have been jailed for failing to pay fines that resulted from convictions. Last summer, it was the site of four days of demonstrations.
The first came on Aug. 6, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, and, like its predecessors, it was a curious mixture of political drama and religious ceremony.
Before marching to the ELF entrance, the participants prepared themselves by singing songs and praying, and then went through a quick refresher course in non-violent protest. No one, however, expected things to get out of hand. The demonstrations had been going on so long and so peacefully in Ashland County that the protesters and the deputy sheriffs were on a first-name basis with each other.
Near dusk, the group began marching down a blacktop roadway to the ELF facility, and, every so often, one of the marchers would fall to the asphalt and another would draw an outline around the “body” in blue, pink or green chalk.
Moving past the wooden gate at the facility’s entrance, the marchers arrived a few minutes later at the gate in the chain-link fence that surrounds the installation.
As several small children from the group played nearby, the adults-most of whom live in quasi-religious communities-formed a circle and took turns stepping into the middle to read a statement from a survivor of the bombings in Japan.
Then, as the rest of the group sang a dirge, “Ashes to Ashes,” 10 demonstrators climbed over the metal gate and into the compound itself. They drew more chalk outlines on the parking lot, and wrote slogans, such as “Think about it” on the sides of buildings. After a time-longer than they expected, it turned out-they were arrested.
Among those 10 were the five from Chicago who stood trial together in December:
– Marge Argyelan, 36, a social worker who works in Uptown, finding homes for homeless people.
– Mike Bremer, 35, a self-employed carpenter who served six months in prison in 1988 for trespassing at a nuclear missle silo in Missouri.
– Charles Carney, 36, a staff member of the Eighth Day Center for Justice, a coalition of Roman Catholic religious congregations working for human rights.
– Katey Feit, 33, a nurse at Children’s Memorial Hospital and a plumber’s apprentice who served six months in prison in 1989 for trespassing at a nuclear missle silo in Missouri.
– Nadia Oehlsen, 28, a free-lance writer who, like the other four, is affilitated with the St. Francis Catholic Worker House where residents live in poverty and serve the homeless in Uptown.
On a snowy, gray December day, the five defendants from Chicago arrived in the lobby of the Ashland County Courthouse, nervous but excited. They were joined by their co-defendant, Tom Hastings, a local free-lance writer who was arrested on the third day of demonstrations. While sympathetic to the other defendants, Hastings, 44, had been covering the protest, not taking part in it.
“Hey, it’s Ed!” Oehlsen said. “Hi, Ed.”
Deputy Sheriff Ed Schlottke, the arresting officer on the first day of the demonstration and on many previous ones as well, came over to the group, smiling and shaking hands.
“They’re nice people,” he said a few minutes later. “They’re doing what they believe in. They’re breaking the law doing it, which is why we’re there.”
Shortly before 9 a.m., the defendants trooped up the grand courthouse stairway to the courtroom on the third floor, and, as they were getting settled at the defense table, Bachman handed each of them a copy of a motion she was planning to argue before Judge Eaton.
The defendants, her motion asserted, should be prohibited from discussing their motivations in trespassing at the ELF site because such “evidence is irrelevant . . . (and) would cause undue delay, waste of time for both the jury and the Court and would create a substantial danger of unfair prejudice and confusion of the issues.”
It was the first time such a motion had been used against demonstrators at the ELF site, but it represented only the latest effort by prosecutors, going back to Eaton when he was Ashland County’s District Attorney, to keep the legal focus as narrow as possible on the simple question of trespass.
“How could we describe to the court that we are accused of entering a facility without describing what that facility is and what it does?” Bremer asked the judge.
“It’s fair,” Eaton responded, “to say the allegations against you were for trespassing at the ELF facility. But, to go on to say, `And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that is a first-strike nuclear weapon’-I think that goes beyond what’s relevant.”
But, a few minutes later, Hastings asserted, “It’s so strikingly relevant. That’s the only thing that is relevant.”
Eaton was not moved.
He ordered the defendants to refrain from mentioning their philosophical or religious beliefs or their views of the scientific impact of the transmitter. And he was quick to cut them off when they strayed.
“Are you familiar with the ELF facility?” Bachman asked Carney during his testimony.
“I’m familiar,” Carney said, “with the ELF facility as a trigger for nuclear holocaust.”
Eaton stopped him, and told the jury to disregard the statement. And so it went.
“This trial,” Oehlsen told the jury during her testimony, “might seem like a lot of fuss over nothing, over a property crime. But I believe trials like this can determine the future policy of our government.”
“I’m going to have to cut in here,” the judge said. “This trial is not about the policy of the government, no matter how much you and the other defendants wish it to be so.”
The sentencing
With the verdicts delivered and the jury excused, Eaton turned to the defendants, wilted and deflated in the aftermath, and asked them if they had any motions to make.
Never, through the 10 hours of the trial, had the defendants looked as at sea-as naive-as they did in that moment. “I wasn’t prepared for this point,” Argyelan said.
So the judge began the sentencing.
He fined Argyelan, Bremer, Oehlsen and Feit $175 for each of three trespassing convictions, or a total of $525. He fined Hastings $175 for his conviction. And he levied a $175 fine against Carney, but then eliminated it because Carney had served 10 days in jail after his arrest.
Hastings, still arguing that he was a working reporter when arrested, agreed to pay his fine. But the other four refused.
In doing so, they were risking jail. Only a few weeks before, Eaton had sentenced two anti-nuclear protesters to six months in jail for failing to pay the fine for trespassing at ELF, but those were veteran demonstrators with numerous previous arrests at the facility.
In the December trial, Eaton-who, at 34, was younger than four of the defendants-took another tack: He asked them if they would prefer a jail sentence or a suspension of driving privileges in Wisconsin for up to five years.
He seemed to be going out of his way to avoid putting anyone in jail for Christmas, and he was looking for help from the defendants. But, overwhelmed, none of them knew what to say.
So Eaton went down the line, suspending the driving privileges of Bremer, Oehlsen and Feit.
Marge Argyelan was the final defendant, and, worried about what a suspension of her driving privileges in Wisconsin would do to her car insurance, she tearfully told Eaton, “I don’t relish a jail sentence, but I don’t want to have this (driving suspension) following me for the rest of my life.”
But Eaton wouldn’t accept that.
“I don’t relish the idea of putting you in jail,” he told her. “There are people in this county who belong in jail. And you aren’t one of them. I’m not going to give you jail time.”
He suspended her driving privileges, and brought an end to the trial.
– – –
Afterward, tears were dried, hugs were given, the defendants milled around the courtroom, almost reluctant to leave.
In the hallway outside, Carney talked about the frustration of the trial, but, with no one going to jail, he was beginning to feel better.
“We wanted,” he said to a Tribune reporter, “to get more attention on ELF, and we succeeded. . . . After all, you’re here.”
