| Five nuns released after protest charges
dropped
By NCR STAFF
Five nuns were released from jail Sept. 15 after felony charges
were dropped for a protest attack on a fighter jet and satellite communications
system during an air show at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.
The nuns had refused to post $1,000 bond or be released on
personal recognizance since their arrest Sept. 9, saying they would not leave
the jail until their cases made their way through the court system, according
to The Denver Post.
The five members of the Plowshares peace movement were released
from El Paso County Jail in Colorado Springs after charges were dropped.
Prosecutors said the cost of damage caused by the nuns’ attack was lower
than expected. “Today we were informed that the damages were less than
$100,” said Deputy District Attorney Dan May. “With a felony, you
have to have damages of at least $500.”
According to the Post, prosecutors were initially told the
nuns caused between $5,000 and $10,000 damage. May said they could still face
misdemeanor charges.
Calling their group Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares, the nuns
hammered a fighter jet and struck and spilled bottles of their blood on a
mobile receiver that is part of a satellite communications system.
The five arrested were: Dominican Srs. Ardeth Platte, 64, and
Carol Gilbert, 52, of Jonah House, a nonviolence community in Baltimore;
Dominican Sr. Jackie Hudson, 65, a member of the Ground Zero Center in
Bremerton, Wash.; Immaculate Heart of Mary Sr. Elizabeth Walters, 57, of
Detroit; and Sacred Heart Sr. Ann Montgomery, 73, of Brooklyn, N.Y.
According to the Denver Rocky Mountain News, Platte said
the group wanted to “unmask this whole plan of the military that is held
so secret, as it relates to total cost, to mining the resources and pouring
them into outer space, to weaponization, and determining enemies who cannot be
there and allies who can be there -- this whole concept of domination of
space.”
The protest at Peterson Air Force base came on the 20th
anniversary of the first Plowshares demonstration at a nuclear weapons plant in
King of Prussia, Pa., in 1980. Montgomery was with Phillip Berrigan, Jesuit Fr.
Daniel Berrigan and Oblate Fr. Carl Kabat at that protest.
The nuns, who could have faced eight years in prison under the
felony charges, told the Post that they had been in jail often for
protests at military installations throughout the United States.
Mike Warren, the Colorado Springs lawyer who represented the
group, said the nuns were “sort of perplexed” by their release.
“They’re used to being thrown in jail for years, and this didn’t
last very long,” he told the Post.
National Catholic Reporter, September 29,
2000
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