
Defendants Betsy Keenan of Maloy, Iowa (center), and Charity Sr. Cele Breen of Kansas City, Mo. (right), march with other activists to the trial Dec. 13.
Defense attorney Henry Stoever meekly approached the bench of Presiding Judge Ardie Bland Dec. 13, complaining that security had refused to let him bring certain pieces of evidence into the courthouse: a full-sized wooden door with a banner proclaiming, "Open the door to a nuclear weapons free world!", as well as an array of picket signs.
Stoever was representing eight nuclear protesters on this unlucky trial date, and Bland, who had sentenced other nuclear activists to jail just two years prior, was the inauspicious icing on the cake.
Bland's eyebrows rose at Stoever's odd request and the packed courthouse tensed for the inevitable ridicule.
"Well, I permit it!" Bland said.
With that statement, Bland set the tone for the next three hours, as protest songs, jokes about national security and even the elderly reveries of Oblate Fr. Carl Kabat, 80, and Franciscan Fr. Jerome Zawada, 76, were permitted in the Kansas City municipal courtroom.
The eight activists were pleading not guilty to charges of trespassing onto the relocated National Nuclear Security Administration's Kansas City Plant July 13. Since 1949, the plant has produced or acquired "about 85 percent of the components that go into a typical nuclear weapon," according to the Government Accountability Office. It took a year to move the nearly 3 million-square-foot facility 8 miles, and the relocation alone cost $80 million, according to a plant press release.