Five Years in Prison for Talking on a Cell Phone
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Jeff Sharlet on the strange trials of the Republican Convention
protestors
03.14.01
LAST MONDAY, when a Philadelphia jury found activist Kate
Sorensen guilty in the first felony trial to emerge from last
August's Republican Convention, they probably didn't realize
they were issuing a historical verdict. The jury found Sorensen
guilty of only a misdemeanor -- chatting on a cell phone, a.k.a.
"criminal mischief" -- but the prosecuting attorney, a man
accustomed to trying murderers, claimed victory. The win sends
protestors "a strong message," he said, and he planned to make
it even stronger by pressing for up to five years of prison
time. But the real message seems to be that the movement which
sprang into mainstream consciousness with the Battle in Seattle
has only become more established: the courts, not just the cops,
are finally taking it seriously.
Despite a penchant in the press to harp on the notion that
they're a bunch of kids blindly in love with the sixties, the
protestors have more or less effectively carried their causes --
stopping or reforming globalization, overhauling the prison
system, canceling third-world debt -- to Washington, Prague,
Philadelphia, and dozens of other cities here and abroad. Using
terms that didn't exist in the sixties to fight problems that
ballooned in the nineties, the new movement is a product of its
times, a point Philadelphia's D.A. is the first official to have
really savvied. After Seattle and even Washington, most of the
jailed protestors were processed quickly and quietly. Charges
were reduced or dropped, fines were paid, and prosecutors
beamed, confident that they'd made it all go away. But in
Philadelphia, where more than four hundred protestors were
arrested before and during the Republican National Convention,
the new American Troubles may well be tying up the courts for
months or even years.
While Philadelphia police beat a slow retreat from their claims
that puppet-making was a cover for bomb-throwers, that jailed
protestors hurled shit, that a zookeeper transporting rare
animals was part of a plot to attack the conventioneers with
snakes and other creepy-crawlies, a legal collective for the
protestors has been preparing a counter-assault of civil suits.
In a move that favors the activists' resolve, the press is
switching sides. Local papers parroted police claims last summer
only to get egg on their faces when the police later admitted
that not only had those charges been unfounded but that they'd
also lied about their illegal undercover surveillance. Now The
Philadelphia Inquirer has outed some of the undercover cops
(several of whom, if scores of protestors are to be believed,
were so enamored of the sixties themselves that they rather
insistently sought to score free love as well as information).
The Inky's tabloid sister, The Daily News, announced that the
private committee set up by the city to woo the convention had
actually taken out an insurance policy for civil-rights
violations. Graham Co., allegedly one of the insurers, didn't
return my calls about just how one goes about writing a policy
on illegal detention, censorship, and cover-ups. The local press
hasn't reported anything more, but we can only expect so much
from these hardworking, ink-stained wretches: Their employer,
Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc., owner of both the Inquirer and
the News, gave $288,365 to the committee that bought the
insurance.
Lawyers for the protestors have had no better luck tracking down
the facts -- so far. That seems likely to change once the
outstanding criminal cases are through. The city charged
forty-one protestors with felonies. Most charges were
drastically reduced or, as in the case of a man charged with
possession of a transparent plastic squirt gun, thrown out. But
the city's D.A., Lynne Abraham -- a political star with a
bigger-than-Philly rep -- seems determined to win the remaining
cases, ten more following Sorensen's. Winning would mean putting
people like William Beckler behind bars. Beckler's a soft-spoken
recent law school graduate who's so slight in frame that he
seems half-man, half-bird. He weighs 130 pounds, but a
muscle-bound police officer nearly twice his size claims Beckler
overpowered him and jumped up and down on his back.
Jamie Graham, currently appealing a misdemeanor conviction,
might seem at first glance a likelier candidate to assault a
cop. He's sturdier than Beckler and wears a Philly police patch
on the crotch of his jeans. But in court, the city claimed that
Graham's main assault was against himself. According to the
prosecutor, the cracked rib and torn-up face that put Graham in
the hospital were part of protestors' plans to make police look
bad by flinging themselves to the ground and scraping their
faces back and forth across the pavement. Graham, Beckler, and
Sorensen will likely join what looks to become a massive and
diverse array of legal action against city government. By the
time the felony trials are over, Beckler believes,
Pennsylvania's weak sunshine laws will have finally cast a ray
of light on that most unusual insurance policy. But it's not
likely that any insurance will be enough to cover the
embarrassment of a down-on-its-luck Democratic city caught
actually planning to beat up and illegally detain protestors on
the behalf of Republican fat cats.
The protestors' legal collective echoes the sixties in one
important regard: the potential of courtroom dramas to make more
noise than 100,000 demonstrators. In 1969, Abbie Hoffman and the
Chicago 7 ju-jitsued the charges against them for disrupting the
'68 Democratic convention into an expos of a government with
little respect for freedom of speech. With that lesson in mind,
and with a long-term strategy of criminal defense and civil
offense, the latest Left may well be about to seize a more
lasting place in the landscape of power.
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Jeff Sharlet is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher
Education and an editor of killingthebuddha.com.
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