On April 10, 1990, as people of faith entered Holy Week and observed Passover, the defendants in the Plowshares Eight trial were summoned to Norristown, Pennsylvania for a final legal pronouncement on an action they had undertaken almost a decade before.
On September 9, 1980, Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Dean Hammer, Carl Rabat, Elmer Maas, Anne Montgomery, Molly Rush, and John Schuchardt had entered the General Electric (GE) plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where they hammered on the nose cones of two Mark 12A warheads.
While the final legal consequences of their action were held up for 10 years by court procedures and appeals, the power of their witness was unleashed; throughout the decade, many people followed with similar "Plowshares actions" all across the country.
Some of them, including three of the defendants who have participated in subsequent actions -- mentioned by name in the opening of Daniel Berrigan's testimony -- are serving long terms in jail as a result of their witness.
We offer the text of Daniel Berrigan's testimony in court before the resentencing of the Plowshares Eight as a tribute to the eight defendants, who -- by the prosecutor's own admission -- offered compelling and eloquent testimony; to those other witnesses serving time in jail for their courageous acts of disarmament; and to their families, who share the cost in great measure.
-- The Editors
Dear friends -- including your honor; Ms. Prosecutor; so many who have gathered from near and far; our honored lawyer friends; our dear friends already in prison -- Carl, Anne, Elmer, all here with us; also Helen, Ladon, Jerry, Greg, Larry, Jean, and others. The very summoning of your names confers courage and steadfastness this day.
Indeed such a day invites and sharpens memories. In this court we were convicted a long decade ago of various charges. The charges, it was clear, were a juridical effort to name, not so much our crimes as ourselves. One is tempted to say in light of the biblical events commemorated this week that the charges were attempts not only to name but to nail us.
I urge you to view with alarm, therefore, the felonious faces you see before you this day. Named and nailed, the defendants, according to the verdict, are breakers and enterers, conspirators, destroyers, worse and worse, and so on and so on. God preserve General Electric and this honorable court from such as ourselves!
When one thinks of it, though, this naming and nailing of people has been going on at a great rate in our lifetime. One thinks of the naming of Nelson Mandela by the South African state some 26 years ago: He was called dangerous, violent, a conspirator plotting the overthrow of law and order. One thinks of the repeated naming and nailing of Vaclav Havel by the Czechoslovakian state over the years: disruptive, enemy of the state, hooligan. One thinks of the noble Sakharov and his long ordeal, condemned and vilified as a traitor to the state.
One thinks inevitably this week of another naming and nailing. It occurred (in a court very like this) in the first century of our era. The accused was hauled in; successive judges had at him, as did the tempestuous crowd. He was named repeatedly, scornfully, by the Roman state and its satellite religionists and thugs: would-be destroyer of temple property, withholder of tribute money, blasphemer, pretender to a lost throne. The charges were as sharp as nails. The names attached to him held firm. He was convicted and capitally punished.
And yet, and yet. Even though the law has claimed so often to speak the last word about the accused, to name the final name, to drive the nails deep, yet some event down the road of time, an intervention, a change of heart, keeps intruding. A seismic shift occurs in consciences. We hear a later, far different word attaching itself to Mandela, Havel, Sakharov, Jesus, and countless other noble criminals, whether in our lifetime or long before.
No court in fact seems able to speak a last word or to drive a final nail, even in a coffin. The scornful names fall to rot in the rude weathers of time; the nails rust and spring apart. Which is to say, justice -- in contrast to the law -- tends to get heard eventually, to forge new names on behalf of the vilified, to raise the very dead.
THE STRANGE FIGURE NAMED Justice, blindfolded, holds in hand a scale -- in order that Justice may touch and sift and weigh (and often find wanting) the law of the land: the lawlessness of nukes, let us say, the lawlessness of GE. That Justice may weigh to a farthing the tyrannical burden of that law, as it lays a hundredweight on our conscience, on our courts, on our churches; heaviest of all, on our poor.
That blindfolded Justice! How far the vision penetrates, how nicely it balances and judges innocence and guilt, crime and consequence. How, contrary to all expectations, all special interests, all greed and fear and enmities, Justice cries aloud -- for justice. And in time, with patience, how vile verdicts are reversed, vilifying names are renounced, murderous nails are loosened!
Given patience and steadfastness in the accused and convicted and imprisoned, this comes to pass. Sometimes in their lifetime, sometimes after. Mandela becomes an only hope of a tormented and degraded society; Havel is made president of his country; Sakharov is rehabilitated in his death. And the nails spring from the hands of the mysterious victim of Good Friday.
On a larger stage, the murdered Jesuits and the murdered women of El Salvador are invoked and honored; the children lying in a bloody swath from Bethlehem to Soweto rise and sing. They are our cloud of witnesses -- witnesses for the defense!
Such is the outcome, the eventual triumph of justice. Such too the momentous reversals suffered by lawless law and disordered order.
Such reversals we note and rejoice in, on such a day as this. How the vile names come unstuck and the murderous nails fall to rust; how the law is struck blind, how blind Justice penetrates the heart of truth, and, in God's good time, rights the wrong!
This -- April 10, 1990 -- is the day of the law. It can hardly be thought of as the day of justice.
And yet we have a slight wrinkle, a half-stifled cry of justice, even today, even in this town. GE is also in the dock today -- not for its great crimes, for its lesser crimes. For greed, not for war crimes. For domestic crimes, petty crimes, in contrast to its monstrous international crimes. This is the best the law can muster, the feeble picayune best. But for the momentous matters that belong before this court, the law is mute; it cohabits with General Electric and acts as its legal cover.
Let it only be said that the sentences meted out today, the sentences meted out to GE and to the Plowshares, are in better hands than ours, or our judges'. In the hands, let us pray, of a Holy Defendant once reviled and misnamed in an earthly court, named and finally nailed in infamy.
His wounds, we believe, are healed and glorious. And his name is above every name, every earthly power and dominion. Including the power and dominion of this court, or of any court of history.
It is to him, finally, we proffer our argument.
The argument goes this way. If the children of the world are accounted safer for our being imprisoned, so be it. We go in a good spirit. If the Earth will be freer of its nuclear illness and insult for our being imprisoned, so be it. We go in a good spirit. If first-strike weaponry is to be judged within the law, and we outside the law, so be it. We go to prison in a good spirit.
Daniel Berrigan is a contributing editor of Sojourners.
After hearing more than three hours of testimony from the defendants, their counsel, and expert witnesses, Judge James E. Buckingham announced to the packed courtroom in that "further incarceration in this case wouldn't do much good," essentially sentencing the Plowshares Eight to time served (see "On The Way," page 50). A few miles away, in a Philadelphia courthouse, General Electric was scheduled to appear for a hearing related to charges of defrauding the federal government of more than $8 million.
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