➤ SNIDE LINES, from p.11
Smith’s “Protest and Survive.” Others actually
protested. People around the world decried not
just nuclear war but also nuclear power, after
accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Plowshares, begun in 1980, was only one group
among hundreds working to abolish nuclear
power and weapons. People like Clare and
her gang were there on June 12, 1982, when
around a million antinuke protestors took over
Midtown and Central Park in New York.
For a minute, back in the last century, protesting
nuclear war was cool. Women in particular
played a huge part; in the 1980s, women’s
peace camps sprang up in places like Greenham
Common in the UK and Seneca Falls here
in New York State. I was part of a Midwestern
lesbian community where, along with supporting
battered women’s shelters and marching
against police brutality, just about everybody
worked somehow against nuclear weapons and
power. We got pretty good at describing what
a nuclear winter would be for those unlucky
enough to survive an initial blast: blackened
sky for years, burning asphalt, deaths from radiation…
We ingested that nightmare.
But it turns out you can’t live more than a
few years contemplating nuclear apocalypse
and ragging on the military industrial complex
if you want a “normal” life. In Nicaragua, the
Sandinistas needed help; then the HIV/AIDS
crisis hit. So, forgetting that the arms industry
never sleeps, most of us migrated to other
causes. Like America, we made peace with our
end-of-the-world nightmare through fun, postapocalyptic
and dystopian scenarios, from
“Godzilla” to “The Hunger Games.”
Years ago, it was relatively simple to identify
governments as the source of nuclear buildup.
Then corporations began devouring every facet
of production, handling, storage. As the nuclear
industry threaded its way through the products
and services of our lives, it became harder to
see, dismantle, and to protest. Gradually, much
of the antinuke movement shuttered.
Plowshares didn’t. Clare’s April 2018 protest
was maybe the 80th Plowshares action. Yet,
how could it possibly change today’s world,
which holds around 14,000 nuclear bombs,
most of which are vastly more destructive than
those that hit Japan, and can be launched (by
design or accident) instantly?
There’s also the fact that Trump has pissed
on nuclear pacts like the Open Skies Treaty, the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and
the Iran Nuclear Deal. A few days after Joe Biden
takes offi ce, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
with Russia will expire. Will Biden move to extend
it? Maybe. But let’s remember that he voted
for the 2003 Iraq invasion, and seems, according
to In These Times, to be stocking his administration
with a “host of pro-war individuals.”
What Joe Biden will never admit is that the
world doesn’t have to work this way. In fact, it
was Clare, not Joe, who told me that there’s a new
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
TPNW going into effect January 22. International
law will soon make nuclear weapons illegal.
Of course, Joe doesn’t care; NATO and the US
oppose the treaty. Clare will go to prison and the
mainstream press won’t peep. All TPNW offers is
small hope for a big miracle. But still, it’s hope.
So COVID. It would be wonderful if Clare and her
comrades never had to go to prison and possibly
contract the virus. It would be wonderful if none of
the 2.3 million, mostly Black or Brown, people in
US prisons didn’t have to be there in the fi rst place
and live with the constant fear of dying inside.
Basically: if you’ve been fi ghting those bad triplets,
please don’t stop. But the whole point of that
seemingly pointless Plowshares action is to wake
us up to the fact that all life forms — regardless
of politics — are desperately, deeply, drastically
interdependent. “Intersectional,” in movement
terms. And if some “right-wingers” deny COVID,
most of us — left, right, center — perpetually deny
the likelihood of nuclear disaster.
So let Clare Grady do her work. And if my
friend goes to prison, if she gets sick there, then
sicker… my heart will break. It may not recover.
But here’s the thing: It won’t break for nothing.
➤ HALE, from p.5
tested life, seven were sentenced to death only
to have those sentences changed to life without
parole on appeal. Altogether, 44 of the 57 are
serving life without parole. Eleven, including
Hale, have sentences with a minimum, though
two of those 11 have what are effectively life
sentences. One will be 123 years old at his fi rst
parole hearing and the second will be 136 years
old at his fi rst parole hearing. Three of the 11
were sentenced to 25-to-life and will have their
fi rst parole hearings in 2022. One, Diaz, committed
suicide in jail and never went to trial.
The last was acquitted at trial. Four of the 57
died in prison.
In its application, the statute had the same
biases that are commonly seen in criminal
justice. Fifty percent of the death-noticed defendants,
or 29, were Black; 21, or 35 percent,
were white; and fi ve, or eight percent, were
Latino. One was an indigenous person and
another was an Arab. In Brooklyn, nine were
Black and two were white. These identities
were gathered from CDO and state corrections
records.
“It’s inevitably racist, no matter how hard
we try,” Kevin Doyle, who headed the CDO,
told Gay City News. “There will inevitably be
wrongful prosecutions, but beyond that it adds
an extra layer of pressure.”
Doyle, who is a devout Catholic, was the
second speaker at the 2004 symposium held
at Fordham University. For Doyle, these sentences
foreclose the possibility of rehabilitation,
which can be a good example for other inmates,
and they suggest that these offenders,
some of whom committed admittedly horrifi c
crimes, cannot be redeemed.
“I think it’s important
to express
the religious value
of redemption in the
secular section of our
penal system,” Doyle
said. “Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn said
the line between good
and evil does not lie
between nations or
people, but in the
human heart. It is important to reinforce that
the line can move and people can fi nd redemption.”
Kyle Reeves, who was an assistant district
attorney in Hynes’ offi ce for 25 years and left
there in 2013, was the lead prosecutor in the
Hale case. He now doubts that Hale was ever
the “worst of the worst,” who would be targeted
under the statute, as proponents of the law argued
at the time.
“I wondered at the time if Michael Hale was
the person this law was designed for and I’ve
reached the conclusion that it wasn’t,” said
Reeves who is now in private practice. “What
he did was horrendous, but I don’t think it was
any worse than any of the other 160 murders
that I tried… He’s not the guy if you put him
out on the street 25 years later… he’s not going
to kill again.”
During the proceedings that led to his guilty
plea, Hale, at times, just wanted to die. As the
plea deal loomed, he understood that he would
be in prison seeing people who committed the
same crime he did leave prison after serving a
25-year minimum and winning parole. He now
says, “I should be in prison for 25 years,” but
what is called for is a second look at the cases
prosecuted under New York’s failed death penalty
experiment.
“For me, is there any possibility or way people
can look in the lens of 2020… and look at people
as a whole person,” Hale said. “I really wish
they could go back and look at these cases.”
December 31, 2020 - January 13, 2 12 021 | GayCityNews.com
/GayCityNews.com
