The Burglary (57 page)

After that testimony, there was little doubt about whether the FBI had taken steps to make sure this crime happened.

The prosecution made no attempt to rebut Hardy's testimony.

When the defendants met shortly after their arrest to discuss trial strategy, there was disagreement on whether they would claim they had been entrapped by Hardy. Pride prevented some of them from acknowledging that they had depended on him. When Kairys first brought up Hardy's role with Grady, he said, “Nah, he was nothing. He's a blowhard. You know, hundreds of draft boards have been raided. We didn't need him.”

The defendants who shared Grady's opinion wanted to rely on
jury nullification—ask the jury to refuse to convict them because the defendants had engaged in civil disobedience—broken the law—in order to protest the
Vietnam War and to take a stand to preserve life rather than cause death. Kairys and the other two lawyers working with the defendants, Marty Stoler and Carl Broge, respected the rich history of jury nullification as it had been used throughout American history to fight unjust laws.

In the end, the defendants agreed to meld two defenses—jury nullification and a defense based on a legal theory that the government had overreached in its effort to make sure the crime took place. That combination of approaches was carried out in a rare collaboration between attorneys and defendants.

Judge Fisher permitted the defendants to explain how their opposition to the war had caused them to commit an act of resistance. He also permitted them to call as witnesses a wide range of people who supported resistance to the war, including both Daniel and
Philip Berrigan.
One by one, defense witnesses spoke of resistance to the government's war policy as an admired virtue central to an understanding of American history and to maintaining a just society. One of the most surprising witnesses was Major
Clement St. Martin, the commander of the New Jersey State induction center in Newark from 1968 to 1971. Files under his control had been destroyed by the defendants. Nevertheless, he testified in their defense. He said he had become completely frustrated after years of making futile complaints through appropriate channels about the gross corruption in the way the draft forced the sons of the poor to serve in Vietnam and released the sons of the rich and sons of state and federal officials from service. His frustrations had grown particularly deep, he testified, in 1969 when a “very high” Selective Service official, responding to complaints filed by the major, told him, “Mind your business. We have twenty million animals to choose from.”

But, prosecutor
John Barry asked the major, did the inequities in the system justify “private individuals breaking into the buildings in the middle of the night”? It is unlikely that Barry, or anyone else in the courtroom, could have anticipated the answer. The major startled nearly everyone when he said, “If they plan another raid, I might join them.”

Howard Zinn told the jury that civil disobedience seems like an outrageous outlaw idea but actually is “at the center of American democratic philosophy.” Called by Ridolfi as an expert witness on civil disobedience and the history of the Vietnam War, he testified that the Camden defendants had acted in the tradition of the people who defied the
Fugitive Slave Acts and freed slaves before the Civil War. Such actions, he said, have been necessary “all through history in order to win justice for people.” He warned against clinging to the idea that “we must obey the law … that the law is
holy.…It's a very bad education we all get because it misses the distinction between law and justice.”

Zinn's greatest impact that day may have been how he profoundly saddened but also inspired Betty Good, mother of defendant Bob Good. Testifying on a Friday, Zinn said the
Pentagon Papers “showed very clearly that the United States was not in Vietnam for purposes of liberty and democracy and humanitarian and self-determination reasons.” The secret memos in the Pentagon Papers, he said, “were saying again and again, when talking about why we were in Vietnam, and why we were interested in Southeast Asia—they were talking about tin, rubber and oil … about the resources of Southeast Asia.”

As Zinn emphasized that idea again—that the United States was in Vietnam for resources: tin, rubber and oil—Mrs. Good, seated in the front row, could not suppress the impact of this revelation. She left the courtroom and sobbed in the hallway. She was inconsolable. That weekend she asked her son to put her on the stand on Monday. A few other parents of defendants had testified about the values they had imparted to their children. Bob Good was not sure what his mother would say. She and his father had strongly questioned his decision to become a conscientious objector and his later decisions to engage in acts of civil disobedience to oppose the war. She had come to Camden to offer moral support but without fully approving of what her son had done in Camden. He was cautious as he stood before her in the courtroom and asked her a general question about how she and his carpenter father had raised him on their farm near Sharpsville in western Pennsylvania.

Never in a courtroom until she came to Camden to provide moral support for her son, Betty Good faced the jurors and first told them the story of two of her ten children, Bob and Paul. Bob, she said, for three years had lived as though the
Vietnam War was next door, as though he could see the killing, hear the bombs, as though he was responsible for it and responsible for stopping it. And Paul, who she said was Bob's closest brother, had proudly joined the Army and gone to Vietnam.

She described driving Paul to the airport in Pittsburgh six years before the day she was testifying. She and her husband were proud their son wanted to serve his country. As Bob would say when he testified, “That's what you did where we came from.” Paul's flight to Vietnam that day marked the first time he was on an airplane. Less than two months later he was killed in the Mekong Delta and brought home to Sharpsville, where he was buried with full military rites.

Mrs. Good told the jury that, like her son Paul, she had not paid much attention to the world outside Sharpsville and also had not paid attention to what the U.S. government was doing in Vietnam.
She had just assumed officials knew what they were doing and that the war was necessary to keep communists from attacking the United States. She looked at jurors steadily as she said, “We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. I know I am. I am ashamed of the day I took my son to that airplane and put him on. I'm ashamed of any pride that I had when taps were played. And I did have pride then. I am proud of my son because he didn't know. A kid that never had a gun in his life.…And to take that lovely boy and tell him, ‘You are fighting for your country.' How stupid can we get? He was fighting for his country! Can anybody stand there and tell me now he was fighting for his country?”

Mrs. Good told the jury that the realization that her son Paul had not died for his country had come to her only as she listened to Zinn three days earlier in the courtroom. “Tin, rubber and oil” had been echoing in her mind ever since she listened to him discuss the history of the war. “And the public was told the main U.S. interest was in saving Vietnam from Communism” and “to save Americans from attack.”

She apologized for her past tendency to blame every new idea Bob had on communism. “I was hung up on it. I feel that is the way most of us middle-class Americans are. We're so hung up on communism … that we don't know what our own government is doing.…I can't understand what we're doing over there. We should get out of this. But not one of us raised our hand. We left it up to these people—the defendants—for them to do it.”

Betty Good surprised her son and transfixed many, if not everyone, in the courtroom, including Judge Fisher. Bob Good asked his mother if there was anything else she wanted to say. “Well, yes,” she replied. “There's one thing I had in mind to say, that when you were arrested you sent me the most beautiful letter. And if I thought I was going to be up here, I would have brought it.” Turning to look at the jurors again, she said, “He spelled it out for us, why he was doing this, how he felt it was something he had to do and indeed put the blame back on us because of the way we brought him up: that he was doing this for the country, not against the country.”

Bob, moved deeply by his mother's words, was about to tell her she could step down from the witness stand when he realized he had forgotten to invite the prosecutors to cross-examine her. When he did so, the judge nodded to Barry that he could proceed. “We have no questions, your honor,” said the prosecutor. Mrs. Good's testimony was uncontested.

IN HIS SUMMATION
to the jury, Barry reminded the jurors that at that time in Washington another burglary, the Watergate burglary, was the center of controversy. Those burglars, like the Camden burglars, he said, thought they were doing something that served a greater political good.

Kairys emphasized the FBI's complicity in the crime in his closing remarks: “Neither the FBI nor the defendants placed any value on those pieces of paper in the draft board office. To the defendants, they were nonliving matter that had no right to exist. To the FBI, they were part of the machinery of war but a part of that machinery that was expendable to discredit
antiwar movements.” He urged jurors to realize that, as Judge Fisher would say in his charge to the jury, “they could acquit if they felt government participation in setting up the crime had gone to ‘intolerable' lengths that were ‘offensive to the basic standards of decency and shocking to the universal sense of justice.' ” As the judge noted in his charge to the jury and Kairys said in his closing remarks, under a new
U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a decision to acquit could be reached on the basis of government overreaching activity even if the defendants had a predisposition to commit the crime.

Making the case for nullification by the jury, Kairys told the jurors that the defendants, out of passionate opposition to the
Vietnam War, had engaged in civil disobedience because “they saw a conflict between law and morality, between law and life.…They made the same choices we would want German people to make when Jews were being killed, the same choices we would want Americans to make when black people were in slavery.”

AS THE DEFENDANTS WAITED
for the jury's verdict, some of them were optimistic. Others were fearful. They knew they had had a fair trial, one where they, unlike the defendants in most antiwar trials of that era, had been permitted to make the case against the war and the case for their decision to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience in protest of the war. But from the beginning defense attorneys had warned them that the chances of all jurors agreeing to acquit all defendants was highly unlikely. It had not happened in any antiwar trial to date. Kairys had cautioned them that acquittals were especially unlikely for crimes committed during wartime that involved breaking into a federal building in the middle of the night and destroying war-related government property. He firmly believed they should be found not guilty on the basis of the standards of nullification and because
the government had wildly overreached when the FBI reignited plans for the break-in and forced it to take place despite defendants' repeated wishes that it be canceled, but he thought acquittals were unlikely.

The defendants thought Michael Doyle was clever but unrealistic when he, during closing remarks to the jury, told the jurors they would have the last word, and then, pausing, smiled and amended his statement: “
No, you will have the last two words.”

On the fourth day of jury deliberation, word went out on a telephone tree that the jury had reached verdicts. Over the next few hours, defendants and their supporters, lawyers from both sides, U.S. marshals, court staff, and journalists drove on that gray and rainy Sunday afternoon from their homes throughout the greater Philadelphia area to be present to hear the verdicts announced.

The atmosphere was tense and somber as the Camden defendants and many supporters gradually filled the large courtroom to capacity. Unable to find seats, latecomers lined the perimeter of the room. In the front, the defendants sat, as they had throughout the trial, around long tables clustered on the left front side, angled so all of them faced the judge. On the right side, the four prosecutors sat at a single long table.

The hum of conversations stopped when Judge Fisher entered the courtroom. From the bench, he prepared the audience for a tedious process. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I am going to bring the jury in in a minute. Before I do, I just wanted to request of everyone, if they would, we have to go through this by defendant and by count, each individually, and it will be quite a bit of time consumed. If we could have no demonstrations, no matter what the verdict is on any defendant or on any count, out of courtesy to the jury, because they are very tired, and we just wouldn't be able to get through it if there was a lot of noise. So I especially request that.