I Was Tried (and Acquitted) for Protesting the Iraq War

On Thursday, July 12, I filed into DC Superior Courtroom 221 along with my six co-defendants to hear my verdict in a case that could have landed me behind bars. We were apprehensive, given that the jury had deliberated less then one full day, but as the jury foreman spoke, his words flowed over us like cool rain on a hot summer day - "not guilty."

Not guilty! How often do anti-war protesters hear those words in a U.S. courtroom?

The trial was the result of a nonviolent action taken in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. on March 29, 2007 - the day the now Democratically-controlled Senate voted to continue funding the Iraq war. As part of the ongoing Occupation Project, the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR) organized a presence in the Hart building atrium (a central courtyard) which consisted of more than 100 cardboard tombstones with pictures of American and Iraqi dead, accompanied by a reading of the names of the dead. Approximately 25-30 individuals participated, and the Capitol Police arrested seven of us.

Our ability to get a jury trial (as opposed to a judge only "bench trial") was almost an accident, a product of the particular charge in the case which, because it carried a possible six month jail sentence, allowed us a jury trial upon request. And as any activist who has ever gone through the process of a trial can tell you, if you get a chance to appeal to a jury of your peers, you go for it.

Under the expert tutelage and training of Mark Goldstone, chair of the Demonstration Support Committee of the Washington DC National Lawyer's Guild and an invaluable resource to those challenging the government in our nation's capitol, we trained extensively to go "pro se," or represent ourselves, during the trial. We wrote our own statements and practiced how to present opening and closing arguments, give direct testimony, cross-examine government witnesses and submit motions for acquittal, as well as getting an understanding of proper courtroom decorum. (The benefits of our judicial system notwithstanding, the judge still stands as a feudal lord over the courtroom, and nothing trashes your chances quicker than disrespecting the judge.)

A little more daunting was training on how to get our anti-war message to the jury. Prosecutors in the District of Columbia, who are used to such cases, will often file a motion in limine ("to limit") in order to prevent any information about the war, such as its illegality or death toll, from entering the trial proceedings. Even though our prosecutor did not offer such a motion in our case, we fully expected that he and the judge would shut us down whenever we talked about the war. They did not disappoint us in that regard, so learning how to insert small snippits of anti-war information throughout the trial, and being prepared to proceed when interrupted were also critical parts of our training. (As was figuring out just how far one could push the judge.) One favorite rhetorical tactic came during the opening statement, when co-defendant David Barrows announced to the jury that "this trial is not about an illegal and immoral war; this trial is not about the thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died in this war…."

Then again, what is considered probative information ("proof") for or against a charge, as opposed to irrelevant or prejudicial information, can change during the course of a trial. We were surprised but generally delighted to find out a few days before the trial that the prosecution intended to introduce the YouTube video of our action as evidence. The prosecutor's goal was to prove that we were demonstrating, and the video did indeed show several minutes of our protest… which the jury then watched over and over and over again. (Once introduced by the prosecution, with our OK, we could use it as much as we wanted for our own purposes. You can view the video used during the trial here.) Another particularly sweet moment came when the prosecutors unfurled our 15 foot banner for the jury to read: "Another Year of War, How Many More Die?" Honestly, we couldn't have done it better ourselves.