Here's a reproduction of a comment left by Damien Moran of the Catholic Worker Movement. I felt it deserved a post of its own. Something that may help the questions/issues raised re. the verdict in our case.
We were charged under the Criminal Damage Act of 1991, which only applies to property. Therefore any fears re. injury, murder of people do not apply to this act nor to the ‘lawful excuse’ defence.
From the outset the jury were informed by the presiding judge the legality of the war was not justiciable in a domestic court of law. Nevertheless, she did allow an expert in International law to testify that our belief that the war would be illegal was a ‘reasonable’ belief supported by the majority of international law experts outside of the U.S. The jury were told at various junctures during the trial that they were not to rule on whether the war was illegal, but rather whether our action had a ‘lawful excuse’ and thus was not criminal.
Important to note that only those not in the courtroom could be surprised by this verdict. During the course of the trial the prosecutor and one of the detectives involved in the case expressed extreme doubt that any jury would ever be able to convict our group.
Our testimony in the trial, supported by the ‘Statement of Faith’ we brought with us during the disarmament, aswell as expert military and international law evidence given to the court and in the context that there is a statutory defence of ‘lawful excuse’ granted by the Oireachtas in the Criminal Damage Act of 1991 (amended in 1997 to remove the ‘immediacy clause’) in that if one has an honest belief (subjective test) that they are protecting property or life of another, their own life or property, or property and life they have a vested interest in, and that their action is reasonable (objective test) taken into consideration all the circumstances, then a person can be deemed to have a lawful excuse to damage property. Under Irish law it is ‘immaterial whether a belief is justified once it is honestly held’ and of course, ‘reasonable’ taking into consideration all the circumstances.
After two weeks in court, the jury unanimously accepted our defence - only about 3% of criminal cases end in acquittal and a minority of these end in unanimous acquittal.
The State, with all its resources, were unable to even convince one juror of our guilt.
The mainstream Irish media, State authorities and US Embassy have lied in public broadcasts without ever retracting that we:
1) Hospitalised, assaulted, overpowered a Garda (something the garda in question denied 3 times on oath during our 3 trials)
2) That the Irish taxpayer would have to pay the alleged $2.6 million damages to the US Navy plane (the Dept. of Transport have only recently stated the Irish taxpayer would not have to pay the damages). Other mainstream media outlets (e.g. The Limerick Leader just out today) continue to insinuate that the taxpayer will have to foot the bill.
It still seems hard for some people to swallow the fact that we were actually found to have committed an act of civil obedience by doing damage to property because taking into consideration all the circumstances it was found to be reasonable, i.e. we were acting to save lives and property - the military expert who gave evidence in our case accepted that this would have been a likely chain of events initiated from the act.
This verdict does not turn the law on its head and does not unleash a Pandora’s box for every and any Joe and Josephine to wage carnage against their neighbour’s dog who barks above an acceptable decible nor towards their neighbour who plays music to loudly at night time thus preventing you from getting your required 8 hour nightly snooze.
Don’t forget, the law we are talking about only refers to damage of property. It is the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Persons Act of 1997 amongst other laws that deal with a person who may be acting in self-defence by doing damage to another person. In this context an accused would have to try prove he/she had employed ‘a justifiable use of force’.
The judge in our case ruled that this law did not apply as the basis/purpose of the '97 law was concerned with those charged with damage to a person. That we already had a statutory defence within the 1991 act (amended in 1997 as stated above).
So the big question now is how does Irish society take the popular mandate from the conscience of the Irish community, 12 ordinary randomly selected members of society, and once and for all end the US military use of Shannon and Ireland’s increasing role in the arms trade, facilitation of troops/munitions being deployed to a theatre of war.
Our hope is that the 1,100 US soliders passing through Shannon today, tomorrow, and into the near future would be supported to conscientiously object to kill and be killed, to wound and be wounded, in the Middle East. That instead, they would go back to their loved ones and join the growing GI resistance with the Iraq Veterans Against War (www.ivaw.net) and other peace groups protesting against, what Madeline Albright (of all people) calls the greatest foreign policy disaster in the history of the US.
You can check out a debate on how this may be achieved at the following thread:
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/77460It has taken 3 trials (the first two collapsed due to the judge’s bias) brought by the Irish State to establish that we are innocent of any wrongdoing. That what we did on February 3rd 2003 was lawful.
The war planes at Shannon and the munitions and troops that pass through on them do not make Ireland or the world a safer place. The should not be protected by the ‘Guardians of Peace’ or the ‘Irish Army’. Instead they should be refused landing, refueling and overflight privileges and the Irish gvt. and all sectors of Irish civil society and the Irish church should at once awaken from their silence and condemn the carnage the U.S./UK and their coalition partners have unleashed in the Middle-East.
The cynicism of the Irish gvt.s’ recent refusals of Israeli weaponry being carried on U.S. planes to help destroy Lebanese lives and civilian infrastructure beacause of the ‘current conflict’ makes their position in support of the Iraq war and occcupation completely untenable. Is their not a current conflict in Iraq - mandated or not in 2004, the war was not initally mandated by the UN. Ireland would do well to take a courageous stance once and for all on this issue and stop facilitating a U.S. gvt. out of control in their quest to bomb the world into ‘democracy’.
They should start by stopping to pull down hard-fought for civil liberties and democratic rights in their own country (right to privacy - unravelled by their mass phone tapping, freedom of assembly - remember the 1,600 protestors rounded up in NYC 2 years ago during the Republican convention, restorative justice - 2.5 million of mainly Hispanic/Afro/Asian ethnicity currently imprisoned in the U.S.)
And as we say in the Catholic Worker, let’s continue to ‘afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted’!
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Published by Colm.
