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Title: Local peace activists sentenced in federal court
Source:
Register Guard
URL Source: http://registerguard.com/csp/cms/si ... tory.cls?cid=50966&sid=4&fid=1
Published: Jan 18, 2008
Author: Susan Palmer
Post Date: 2008-01-18 16:29:07 by Ferret Mike
Keywords: None
Views: 114
Comments: 6
How do you keep a peace activist from breaking the law if she embraces the standard penalty: community service? That was the challenge facing assistant U.S. attorney Bud Fitzgerald in federal court on Thursday afternoon. Eugene peace activist Peg Morton — a 77-year-old Quaker who has been arrested at least seven times since 1989 — was one of four protesters who refused to leave Sen. Gordon Smith’s office on Oct. 12. They targeted Smith because of their concern about his vote for funding the war in Iraq. They were cited for failing to comply with lawful directions and escorted from the Wayne L. Morse U.S Courthouse, the new federal building. Contending with the other three protesters was simple enough. Judge Tom Coffin agreed to the deal proposed by Fitzgerald and defense attorney Lauren Regan in a courtroom filled with about 25 spectators, most of them Quakers. Eugene doctor Paul Qualtere-Burcher, former special education teacher Lisette Ewing and nurse practitioner Laurie Knackstedt were first-time offenders and agreed not to contest the charges, and complete 20 hours of community service within the year with the promise that the cases against them would be dismissed. But the U.S. attorney’s office had already done this dance with Morton when she protested the Iraq war by refusing to leave Rep. Peter DeFazio’s Eugene office last winter. She’d been ordered to do 20 hours of community service and told not to re-offend. Morton completed 37 hours of community service, but she couldn’t keep herself from another act of civil disobedience. What’s a prosecutor to do? “Ms. Morton gladly gives community service on her own,” Fitzgerald said. “The government doesn’t see that as much of a deterrent.” Punishment for the Class C misdemeanor tops out at a one-year jail sentence and $5,000 fine. But that seemed a little extreme for protesters who were on such good terms with the officer who cited them, Inspector T.C. Keedy, that he didn’t bother handcuffing them when he escorted them from the building in October. The government finally settled on a $100 fine for Morton’s first offense, payable within four months, and another $100 fine for the second offense, suspended if Morton keeps from re-offending for the next 12 months. At first, Morton balked at paying the government a fine. “It troubles me that while I receive a consequence for disobeying the law, others who brought us into an illegal war have suffered no consequences,” Morton said in statement to the judge. “I find myself unwilling to voluntarily pay into a department that condones torture and Guantanamo.” Fitzgerald and Morton’s attorney Regan said they believed the money would go into a fund directed toward victims rather than into the federal government’s general fund, and Morton agreed to pay. As to whether she’ll commit another act of civil disobedience, she wouldn’t entirely rule it out, although she has no current plans. Morton said she takes action when the spirit moves her. “We can’t ever know whether we’re going to be effective. We can only act,” she said.
Poster Comment: Peg is a good friend of mine. I doubt if she is going to retire just because of this. ;-)
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#1. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
Peg is an asset and a friend to mankind. However, the system has developed in such a manner that allows it to chew up and digest protestors without even considering their message. Those ignored are forced to finance the system that abuses them, locks them up, takes their property and destroys their conscience. The violence against protestors is continually ratcheted up by the authorities which will force the same consideration on the part of protestors. If then, we decide to become more aggressive, we should be so aggressive as to avoid playing catch up. Let them play catch up.
"Give us liberty and give them death" ... noone222 1-10-08
Nothing is signed yet, but Jeff Luers, (Free) who was convicted of SUV arson was resentenced the 8th. He himself has been open about the fact he will be getting out December 2008. I see Critter all the time, he's out now, and there is allot on this topic I cannot talk about here. Unfortunately. Free and I have worked on tree-sits together, and his original 22 year, 10 month sentence was way too long. I am glad he will be getting out, he has been imprisoned way way too long.
Did he intend to get arrested for the SUV fires ?
"Give us liberty and give them death" ... noone222 1-10-08
Nope. They were following him and Critter and arrested him immediately after the arson. They had apparently been watching him after the attempted arson at the Tyree oil facility near his apartment. He was also convicted of that arson attempt as well. They used lit candles and open fuel containers to create vapors in the rising morning sun to start a fire that probably would have destroyed half the neighborhood because he doesn't know how to calculate what an explosion and fire with that many thousands of gallons of fuel oil would do. He would have destroyed his own place too very likely. After they caught him, they found the same fuel mix he was using for the Romania Chevrolet fires in his place. I hope he has become a more think before he acts guy after several years in the pen, but we'll see. I'm sure he will enjoy the steady supply of activist groupie girls that have made Critter's life better since getting out and hang out here for a while, but he is a different sort of guy then Critter with a genuine fire in the belly. He absolutely had those freddies in the woods terrified of him at the Fall Creek tree sit, Red Cloud Thunder. He is a force to be reckoned with if he thinks and channels it right.
The Fall Creek tree-sitters generally rejected the unspoken code of nonviolence that had guided the Warner Creek campaign just a few years earlier. They fought with Forest Service officers (or "freddies," as they called them), pissed on them from the trees, even staged a fake hanging to freak them out. Some of the punks trashed the camp, letting their dogs fight and hump and tear up the forest understory. Tree-dwelling flying squirrels burrowed into their sleeping bags, ransacked their food and fell into their compost buckets. At times the activists got dangerously drunk hundreds of feet off the ground, and once a propane tank blew up in a tree-sit. Earth First!ers and Cascadia Forest Defenders, sensing the hard edge, generally distanced themselves from the campaign while still supporting it with food and supplies. The tree-sitters were, after all, braving freddies and foul weather to keep chainsaws out of the forest. Dubbing their camp Red Cloud Thunder Free State, the Fall Creek tree-sitters embraced their role as the outcasts of the Earth First! movement, viewing themselves as the real revolutionaries — the ones who were ready to push beyond civil disobedience. As punks defended the forest and eco-anarchists rollicked in Whiteaker, the Eugene-based Earth First! Journal editors — including Jim Flynn and Lacey Phillabaum — put the local movement into a larger context. They gathered news of civil disobedience and eco-sabotage actions in Europe, South America, Asia and all over the U.S., examining the intersections of labor, civil rights and anti-consumerism movements. Earth First! was growing, if painfully. The EF!J ran a feature called "Earth Night News," which announced sabotage actions claimed by the Earth Liberation Front and other covert actors. ELF had been conceived in England in 1992, when eco-activists decided to sever controversial sabotage actions from the civil disobedience-oriented Earth First!. The Sept.-Oct. 1993 EF!J introduced ELF as "a movement of independently operating eco-saboteurs." Earth Night actions spanned the globe, but in the late 90's an especially methodical cluster struck the Pacific Northwest. It began on Oct. 28, 1996, when arsonists torched a Forest Service pickup truck in Detroit, Ore. They also attempted to burn down the ranger station, but the fuel-filled plastic jug on the roof didn't ignite. Spray-painted on the building was a tag American police hadn't seen before: "ELF." Only two days later, arson struck the Forest Service ranger station in Oakridge, Ore. The building burned from the four corners into the middle — seemingly a professional job. The father of the Warner Creek campaign, Tim Ingalsbee, was crushed: years of his documentation of the Warner Creek Fire had been in that building. Arsons followed at several BLM wild horse corrals, a slaughterhouse, a wildlife research station, a Vail ski resort, a forestry office in Medford, a meat company in Eugene. No one was hurt in any of the actions, but communiqués condemned the targets as "Earth-rapers" who deserved what they got. The EF!J also ran "Dear Ned Ludd" columns, which offered detailed tips for carrying out sabotage actions like tree-spiking, electrical tower blow-outs and arsons with time-delayed fire-starters. A disclaimer noted that EF! didn't necessarily endorse such enterprises, but the journal's overall tone was supportive. Here is a link to an article in the Eugene Weekly that discribes the tone and style of the Fall Creek campaign. Picture of SUVs burning at Romania Cherolet.
Right on ... that's a revolution worth talking about.
"Give us liberty and give them death" ... noone222 1-10-08
Peg is a good friend of mine.
#2. To: noone222 (#1)
http://www.freefreenow.org/
#3. To: Ferret Mike (#2)
#4. To: noone222 (#3)
(Edited)
#5. To: noone222 (#3)
(Edited)
But none of those campaigns stand out like the Fall Creek blockade, launched in spring 1998 to stop the Clark timber sale in Willamette National Forest. The dominant crew at the camp was a group of crusty, itinerant punks in their teens and early twenties, some of them happy just to have a free crash-pad and food. Others, however, were experienced activists out to save trees by any means necessary.
#6. To: Ferret Mike (#5)
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