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Five Years in Prison for Talking on a Cell Phone 03/14/01 - by Jeff Sharlet - Feed Magazine Jeff Sharlet on the strange trials of the Republican Convention protestors 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 exposé 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. Jeff Sharlet is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education and an editor of killingthebuddha.com. |
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