Left Field
Fourteen Dollars
By Patricia Nell Warren
-----
Today the United States has suddenly junked its respect for civil
disobedience. Quietly, when Americans weren't looking, law enforcement and
legislators have slapped a high markup on the penal price of protest.
On April 2, a courtroom drama unfolded as Judge Thomas Mellon faced ACT UP
San Francisco members David Pasquarelli, Michael Bellefountaine, and Todd
Swindell. Last year, when the three men went to a Project Inform meeting,
intending to protest PI's recommendations of drugs that can have serious,
sometimes fatal, side effects, a scuffle broke out. The three were arrested,
and had the book thrown at them by the San Francisco district attorney's
office. The jury didn't buy the felony charges, including those for assault.
But the three still faced sentencing for misdemeanors: disturbing the peace,
unlawful assembly, participating in a riot. Possible maximum: one year in
jail and a $2,000 fine for Pasquarelli and Swindell, plus six months and
$2,000 for Bellefountaine.
A year behind bars for such minor offenses?
Even in the worst of times, our country has traditionally allowed wiggle room
for civil disobedience. After all, the U.S.A. was founded on an act of
disobedience called the American Revolution. In the early 1800s, Henry David
Thoreau infuriated Puritan autocrats by refusing to pay religious taxes
mandated by Massachusetts law. Was Thoreau jailed for a year? No. In his
landmark essay "Civil Disobedience" he tells of passing one night in the
local calabozo.
In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, in a time
of unrelenting segregation law, when blacks were still lynched in the South.
Was Parks jailed for a year? No. She was arrested and fined $14. In 1958 the
Rev. Martin Luther King was fined $14 for ignoring a police order at a
demonstration. (King chose fourteen days in jail rather than paying the
fine.) Through the '60s and '70s, the campus takeovers, anti-war marches, and
grape-pickers' strikes, these arrests were usually treated like parking
tickets. Charges were summary, and the cops let you go. A long arrest record
was an activist's badge of honor. Only a few did serious prison time because
they advocated overthrow of the government.
Today the United States has suddenly junked its respect for civil
disobedience. Quietly, when Americans weren't looking, law enforcement and
legislators have slapped a high markup on the penal price of protest. They
now consider that kind of activism to border on "domestic terrorism," and are
prosecuting it under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
(RICO), the way organized crime and harassment of abortion clinics are now
prosecuted. A key court decision, NOW v. Scheidler, has "created outrageously
prohibitive sanctions for what are essentially minor violations of law,"
according to Crisis magazine. Nonviolent protesters are being hammered with
huge bails, huge fines, multiple counts, and many months, even many years, in
prison. A single arrest can now destroy your life.
Indeed, many students who demonstrate about campus issues like affirmative
action have no idea how bloodthirsty the law has gotten...till it's too late.
Several years ago, a seventeen-year-old I know was arrested at an anti-David
Duke fracas at Cal State Northridge. He thought it would be a lark, but was
shocked to find himself facing three felony charges, possible trial as a
violent adult, and the first of "three strikes, you're out." Only vigorous
lawyering by his parents got him probation as a juvenile.
Last year was a watershed in American history -- the thunderclap reappearance
of large-scale sixties-type demonstrations. We live in a new age of festering
social problems, but we also face new government hostility to dissent. During
the World Treaty Organization meeting in Seattle, as well as the Republican
and Democratic conventions, protesters found themselves facing police trained
for urban war. Cops overreacted and arrested bystanders, medics, and media
people as well as actual demonstrators. Some were slammed with million-dollar
bails and held for days without being notified of charges or allowed to call
lawyers. Thanks to ACLU involvement, many got their charges dismissed, but
the unlucky are looking at long months or years in prison. Most major media
avoided covering these trials or even noting the erosion of our American
right to protest.
The punitive new attitude toward protest is part of a general obsession with
crime-busting and prison-building. In a recent Salon article titled "Hooked
on Prisons," Maria Russo wrote, "In the aftermath of the Cold War...prisons
are now seen primarily as sources of jobs and revenue, rather than as places
for rehabilitating criminals...There are, of course, other factors at play in
the prison boom: The crime rate may have fallen steadily in the last decade,
but the length of the average prison sentence has gone up." Another author,
Joseph T. Hallinan, tells in his "Going up the River" how the rise of
mandatory-sentencing laws, in particular those for drug offenses, are packing
the prisons with nonviolent offenders serving long terms. Protesters now get
essentially the same treatment as drug offenders.
A similar erosion of protest rights is happening in Canada, where one
nonviolent logging protester, a seventy-one-year-old grandmother was
sentenced to one year in prison.
I'm alarmed by this trend -- especially as it impacts growing outrage around
abuses in our medical system. Evidence of harm done by some AIDS drugs has
piled so high that the federal government about-faced in January, withdrawing
earlier fulsome recommendation of "hit early, hit hard." The government had
known about the drug problems for years -- side effects were openly discussed
at the 1998 Geneva AIDS conference. Yet Washington waited for three years,
and risked countless lives, before acting.
Rising outrage at the inhumanity of our medical system, and ongoing
revelations about the dangers of many drugs and vaccines rushed through FDA
approval, is creating a growing crisis of confidence among patients,
families, and doctors. Healthcare issues have already sparked demonstrations
-- like the people in wheelchairs who besieged the DNC headquarters in
Washington to demand increased healthcare choices. The stage is set to view
health protesters as "domestic terrorists."
The HAART meltdown, in particular, creates acute political discomfort for
state and city public-health officials, as well as for pharmaceutical
companies, health nonprofits, and AIDS service orgs, who took hard-line
positions on AIDS drugs and suddenly found the rug yanked from under them
when "hit early, hit hard" bit the dust. In San Francisco, where
public-health officials view themselves as the point guys for national AIDS
policy, conflict between AIDS dissenters and AIDS defenders has reached the
boiling point. A punitive sentence for the ACT UP three would have a national
impact -- one more nail in the coffin of legal protest. The three men were
convicted only for first-time misdemeanors. How would society benefit from
their long imprisonment when Uncle Sam admits to the very problems they were
protesting?
That day in San Francisco, Judge Mellon's fax machine smoked with incoming
messages demanding the maximum punishment. Mayor Willie Brown, who seemed to
have forgotten that assault charges had been dismissed, characterized the
defendants as violent criminals. Some faxes, including mine, called for
leniency. The defendants rejected a three-year probation deal.
In the courtroom, before a packed crowd, the judge sentenced Swindell and
Pasquarelli to 120 days in the county jail. Bellefountaine got sixty days.
The three were fined $1,000 each. The men's attorneys immediately appealed.
Said Swindell: "The Mayor and District Attorney need to get a clue: wasting
hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to criminalize political protesters
and stamp out AIDS dissent won't fly in San Francisco."
I never thought I'd see the day when a $14 fine looked lenient. Thoreau's
essay may still be required reading in school, but if Thoreau and Rosa Parks
were arrested today, they'd wind up in orange jumpers behind razor wire.
Americans who assemble peacefully to protest corporate greed, environmental
destruction, and human rights are being sent a chilling message. That message
is meant for health protesters as well.
-----
Patricia Nell Warren's newest novel "The Wild Man" is now available at
bookstores everywhere or at wildcatpress.com. You can e-mail her at
patriciawarren@aol.com. Go to
this link to find out more about her.
-----
Want to respond? Send letters to:
Mailbox
25 Monroe Street, Suite 205
Albany, NY 12210
Phone: (518) 426-9010
Fax: (518) 436-5354
Email: mailbox@aumag.org