JOHNSON: Protesters guilty only of acting on their beliefs

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Friday, December 7, 2007

They had, in the end, absolutely no chance for acquittal. You don't need a fancy law degree hanging on the wall to see that.

Indeed, a Denver County Court jury of four women and two men on Thursday convicted all three after less than an hour of deliberation on charges of trespassing. They were quite obviously guilty.

What was even easier to figure after two days of trial was that trespassing, alone, was never once the sole point for Rafael Eggers, Sue Gomez or Merrill Carter.

Their trial before Judge Claudia J. Jordan, besides being great theater, was a sometimes-riveting lesson in the responsibility of the governed to hold accountable those elected to govern, and on the price that is paid when the effort falls on deaf ears.

A little background: All they wanted was a brief chat with U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar. Eggers, Gomez and Carter were among a group of people who had been after him for months to vote against continued funding of the Iraq War.

They had called him, e-mailed him and snail-mailed him, finally arranging a Feb. 1 meeting with Matt Cheroutes, then an aide to the senator.

The meeting, the calls and the mail, they would later contend, were met with yeah-yeah-we-get-it responses.

Another funding request from the Defense Department was approaching. Congress was in recess. They would press their case with the senator on Feb. 21. In his office.

They arrived, about a dozen of them, shortly after 1:30 p.m. The senator that day was touring the federal prison in Florence with then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. They would not leave, the group told his staff, until they met with him personally or at least spoke with him on the telephone.

So they sat on the floor and began reading the names of the Colorado military dead and the Iraqi dead, ringing a bell after each name.

At 5 p.m., the office's closing time, seven were left. They were asked to leave. They refused. Police arrived at about 5:30 with handcuffs and leg shackles. Four would plead no contest or guilty.

Assistant City Attorney Robert F. Reynolds barely broke a sweat proving his case against the remaining three, each acknowledging on the stand that they had remained in the senator's office past closing time.

Yet their intent, contended their lawyer, Walter Gerash, was not to trespass, "but to save lives."

"These three stood for life over death, for communication over worrying about when a door is closed," he told the jury.

"It is our duty, not just our right, to stop atrocities when we see them, and atrocities are occurring in Iraq," testified a defiant Merrill Carter, 50.

As a young man, he testified, he had become fascinated by the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II, how many German citizens were convicted of war crimes for standing silent in the face of Nazi atrocities they witnessed. It informed who he is today, he said.

Sue Gomez is 61, soft-spoken, a former nurse who for 13 years worked as a church secretary and spent several years as a missionary to the poor in Mexico. She now works at the Catholic Worker homeless shelter in Denver.

She never blinked on the stand while explaining why 5 p.m. meant little to her.

"Violence does not stop violence," she said. "Anything done to bring light to the immorality of this war was worth the risk of my being inconvenienced."

Some people see things more clearly and a lot faster than most of us. The Salazar Seven, as they dubbed themselves - the seven who went to jail for actions on a day when Ken Salazar refused to even put in a call to his own office - are among them.

And it was almost surreal to hear them testify of peace and of attempting to save soldiers' lives.

I realized that I have witnessed this war from both sides of it, on the roads, streets and hellholes of Iraq with soldiers, and in a courtroom with those fully convinced none of them should have ever stepped foot there.

Having witnessed the sacrifice made on both sides, all I honestly see is patriotism - the real kind in which men and women of courage risk everything they are in the name of a country they love.

Sue Gomez, Rafael Eggers and Merrill Carter, I have come to see, are just as heroic as Sgt. 1st Class Justin Vasquez, Lt. Mike Smith, Lt. Col. Ross Brown and Specialist Scott Ulbrich, men and women who put everything on the line in service to our freedoms.

In the end, perhaps even Judge Jordan saw this. She fined each of the three $50, immediately suspending all of it. She suspended court costs payments, too.

The true irony of Thursday's trial?

Ken Salazar, right or wrong, is now a leading opponent of the Defense Department's request for additional funding for the war in Iraq, believing there is no solution to an adventure that has cost nearly 4,000 American lives and untold thousands of Iraqi lives.

"For us, it is a victory of sorts," Merrill Carter said after the trial. "I still wish he would take a stronger stance. People are still dying. But he is coming around.

"Maybe it proves democracy works, that it doesn't just happen in a voting booth. You have to work at it. You have to be vigilant."

• December 7, 2007

  8:46 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  Michael writes:

  "Violence does not stop violence" - Really??? I think anyone who has come through a war that managed to defeat tyranny, concentration camps, mass murder, oppression and murder of political opponents, and mass genocide would disagree on this point. (Ask an Jew from WWII) At least anyone with a slight grasp of history and world events gets this, but apparently not these people.

  "Some people see things more clearly and a lot faster than most of us." - And apparently some people don't see things at all no matter how mych it is explained to them and no matter how often you refer them to history for countless examples of how when tryanny and despots are not dealt with harshly, the body count just continues to add up slowly over the years and decades.

  These people are morons and on top of all that they have no grasp of when it's time to leave. They deserve as harsh a fine and penalty as can be given. Free speech???? Hardly. Take it outside my left wing, anarchy loving friends.

• December 7, 2007

  9:33 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  Spencer writes:

  I think anyone who believes that this war was justified is a moron.