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Mediators Work at Ground Zero

    Federal employees wage shuttle diplomacy between police and protesters. They are lauded for helping maintain relative peace.
    Duke Helfand & Carla Hall w/ Janet Wilson LATimes 8/18/00 pU6
Vermont McKinney was at the eye of virtually every explosive episode on the streets of Los Angeles this week. Looking like a camp counselor in khaki pants, a navy blue polo shirt and baseball cap, McKinney placed his body many times between riot-helmeted police and shouting protesters. He helped bring the two sides together in private meetings to orchestrate everything from march routes to arrest procedures. McKinney and 14 other mediators from the U.S. Department of Justice walked their own delicate blue line to maintain an intermittent peace during the Democratic National Convention, most memorably defusing a confrontation in front of the LAPD's Rampart station house Wednesday.
As members of the Department of Justice's Community Relations Service, they are unarmed civilians, unable to arrest anyone, and they cannot be subpoenaed to testify in court about events they encounter on the job. They carry only fanny packs with water bottles, radios, pens and paper. Their ability to maintain peace won praise both from police and protesters. "We are here to try to prevent an escalation of tension, to avoid violence," said McKinney, the team's leader and a former basketball star at Jordan High in Watts.

The mediator service was created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Although they are little known and understaffed--there are just 41 community relations mediators nationwide--they have worked behind the scenes through many of the nation's most explosive events, including the Elian Gonzalez tug of war in Miami, the aftermath of the 1998 police shooting of Tyisha Miller in Riverside and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Aware of the potential for sudden--and deadly--conflict in Los Angeles, the service tripled its local contingent, flying in staff from across the country. In Los Angeles, the mediators helped protesters figure out where to park their buses and how to move their cumbersome flatbed trucks. More important, they waged shuttle diplomacy between police and protesters.
The mediators' first night was not a promising debut. On Monday, demonstrators by Staples Center began to throw concrete blocks at police. Officers on horseback moved in and other police began shooting rubber bullets. Ron Wakabayashi, director of the mediator service's western region, pulled his staff out of the area just before police declared the protest an unlawful assembly. "I knew there was nothing more they could do," Wakabayashi said. "It's a hard call. Some wanted to hang in there until the last minute."
Wednesday was much more … downtown, mediator Kenith Bergeron planted himself on the sidewalk near Pershing Square after officers, guns cocked and loaded with rubber bullets, lunged toward the jeering demonstrators. "Keep moving, keep moving, let's keep it moving everyone," Bergeron shouted as the tense moment passed and the protesters resumed their strained march toward Staples Center. McKinney and mediator Carol Russo played the part of diplomats earlier in the day, when they helped broker and conduct meetings between Rampart Division police and protesters marching on the station. The two sides met in MacArthur Park, as they had the day before at the station, to iron out details of the march and the arrests. As a result, the civil disobedience ended peacefully; 37 protesters were arrested without trouble.

The Rampart station commander, Capt. Mike Moore, said the mediators helped keep tensions down. Moore said that during the Wednesday march, he and other officers became concerned about a group of demonstrators who broke off from the rest of the crowd, covered their faces in hoods and began hoisting bottles containing an unknown liquid. He spoke with one of the mediators, who then talked with the group, and those dissident protesters "just sort of dissolved."
"In my opinion, they've been able to work with the crowds, and reach out to some of the sub-factions, and say, listen, think about what you're doing here, you don't want to get arrested and not be able to have your say." Protest organizers said the mediators are effective because they have forged relationships with both sides. "I've seen them de-escalate tensions in the streets," said Victor Narro, an organizer of a march Thursday against sweatshops and director of the Workers' Rights Project at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. "They're also risking their lives to be on the streets. It's a good side of the federal government."

    LAPD, Activists Choreograph a Confrontation
    Protests: Marchers meet with police before demonstration at Rampart station. Several skirmishes occur near Staples Center.
    Duke Helfand, Carla Hall, Nicholas Riccardi LATimes 8/17/00 pA1
At the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart station Wednesday, a morning march had all the earmarks of a serious confrontation: Hundreds of demonstrators vented at the police, blocked the entrance to the building and were led away in handcuffs. Behind that apparently antagonistic scene, however, was a carefully orchestrated arrangement, a minuet of police and protesters worked out in such detail, and with enough trust on both sides, that the LAPD actually advised its critics on what crime to commit in order for them to be conveniently and safely taken into custody.
Capt. Michael Moore, who oversees the Rampart station, said he and others "choreographed" the events, down to having police suggest which crimes might make for simple, uneventful arrests. Protest leaders agreed. "They asked what it would take to get arrested," Moore said. "We looked up the law and gave them some ideas. They wanted to lie down in the street, but we told them they wouldn't get arrested for that." Instead, they were told that if they sat on the sidewalk, Moore would declare it an unlawful assembly. If they didn't move, Moore told them, they would be arrested.
Thirty-seven people did just that and were arrested, most carried inside the station by police officers. That demonstration was just one in a busy day of actions intended to raise the issue of police abuse generally and to challenge the LAPD specifically. Some did not go nearly as smoothly as the Rampart event. Later in the day, police and demonstrators engaged in a series of skirmishes through downtown, capped by a particularly charged face-off outside Staples Center.

But in each instance, negotiations--some detailed and done far in advance, others improvised in the heat of the moment--prevailed over confrontation. The cooperation between police and protesters involved in the march on the Rampart station grew out of a series of meetings, which included a visit to the home of one of the organizers, another session at the Rampart station and a final meeting in MacArthur Park, just hours before the demonstration. According to participants on both sides, the first sessions were to get to know one another and to clarify roles for the demonstration. The final meeting, early Wednesday, was called to review plans and make sure that both sides understood what the other would do in the event of trouble.
Police and the protesters' representatives played the key roles in those talks, but they were aided by the U.S. Department of Justice's Community Relations Service. "The whole scenario was known," said Fermin Dominguez, a 19-year-old psychology major at Cal State Northridge who helped organize the march. "LAPD knew our plans. It was peaceful all the way. We were talking no violence, no violent civil disobedience." As part of the negotiations, demonstrators agreed to provide their own security. They kept the marchers in line and, when the police struggled to keep news photographers at a safe distance … asked the media to step back. Most did. In return, demonstrators asked for the opportunity to present authorities with four demands. They insisted that any Rampart-related legal settlements be paid for out of the LAPD's budget; they asked for an end to all cooperation between the LAPD and the Immigration and Naturalization Service; they called for the appointment of an independent civilian review board to examine allegations of police misconduct; and they demanded an end to racial profiling, along with requiring the LAPD to gather statistics to determine whether and to what extent such profiling goes on today.

The peaceful end to Wednesday's first protest came as a particular relief, given Rampart's place at the center of an ongoing LAPD scandal--one that includes allegations of murder, brutality, perjury and theft by police officers. Even on a calm day, Rampart is a busy police station. The area ranks third in the LAPD for violent crimes and violent crime arrests. The Rampart Division covers eight square miles, some of the most condensed and impoverished neighborhoods in the city. About 375,000 people live in the neighborhoods covered by the Rampart station.
Wednesday, its normal operations were overseen not just by Capt. Moore but also by a panoply of top law enforcement officials. Deputy Chief Maurice Moore and Cmdr. Tom Lorenzen, who heads the department's convention planning unit, were on hand, as was the head of the California Highway Patrol. As the action unfolded in front of the station, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks watched from the station roof. It came off as planned. Thirty-seven people were arrested for allegedly blocking the entrance to a public agency.
Vermont McKinney, the Justice Department's senior mediator and team leader for operations at the Democratic National Convention, expressed satisfaction at the results. "We got everybody on the same page," said McKinney, whose organization was created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "We reached an understanding on how things were going to proceed. That was the key." Having successfully negotiated their way through that potential flash point, police and protesters regrouped and, hours later, shadowed one another again, this time along a march from Pershing Square to Parker Center, headquarters of the police department.

Officers stood at attention, riot helmets on, muscled arms gripping clubs firmly at their waists. Some officers clenched their jaws, others were more relaxed. Monday night's clash between police officers and a small band of violent demonstrators outside Staples Center still was on the mind of at least some protesters. One man had arrows painted on his stomach pointing to a scar from a "stinger round," one of many fired at demonstrators as police cleared an area that night. During the march, some protesters taunted police: "Come on y'all, break the silence," the crowd chanted. "Rampart is corrupt with drugs and violence."
The group of marchers included a tight knot of black-clad, self-proclaimed anarchists, the same group that was at the heart of Monday's conflict. This time, however, they caused no real trouble. At one point, in fact, several of them interceded to break up a tense moment between a leftist activist and a young man marching with the crowd but carrying an anti-abortion sign. One protester tried to take the sign from him, but a black-garbed figure from the anarchist knot stepped in and politely asked the anti- abortion protester to find another place to march. "This is an anarchist area," said one black-garbed figure. "We don't really feel comfortable with that message."

A few minutes later, the same group lit an American flag on fire and then sang a parody of the national anthem. As the flag burned, they waved their black flags and danced around. A piece of burning American flag came to rest on a news cameraman's shoulder and he brushed it off frantically. As the march neared Parker Center, stores closed in the Los Angeles mall, a block away. Almost all shopkeepers locked up, some securing their premises with metal security fences or doors. But when protesters arrived in front of police headquarters, they were greeted by two rows of helmeted police guarding the entrance, backed up by a second group of officers in tight formation. Different Results
In 1992, Parker Center was the scene of one of the LAPD's most disgraceful moments. That afternoon, police stood by helplessly, then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates occupied at a cocktail party fund-raiser across town, as rioters infuriated by the not-guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case tore up property and set a police department guard shack on fire. This time, the scene was as different as the results. In 1992, a crowd that included young agitators mixed with a largely African American group of angry residents to vent their fury at racist police practices. On Wednesday, the group of protesters were less ethnically diverse than the police officers against whom they squared off.

And while protesters in 1992 came bent on causing damage, the group this time bore a confrontational message but, despite a few flashes of temper, delivered it peacefully. "Every day we have kids being beaten down by the police," said Jesse Ramon, a member of the organizing group. "Every day people are losing their lives to police brutality. They may have the guns, batons and handcuffs, but we have our voices." Cruising along with the protesters was a flatbed truck carrying a memorial of sorts to people killed by police. The truck, sponsored by a national group called the October 22 Coalition, carried two giant boards emblazoned with 2,000 names and some photos of the deceased.
When the truck parked on Los Angeles Street near the front of Parker Center, Richard Allard, 19, a student from Santa Rosa Junior College, was standing next to it, watching the protest. "That's my uncle up there," he said, pointing to a photo on the truck. "His picture is the fourth one down." His uncle, Dale Robbins, was killed in 1996 in the Santa Rosa police station lobby, according to Allard. "For this Stolen Lives Project, the idea is to get the word out," he said.

The demonstrators were given a permit to protest in front of police headquarters for an hour, which they did before departing back across downtown for Staples Center. Along the way, the carefully arranged truce that had governed the day's events began to fray. Some incidents flared into conflict; most were quickly quashed, sometimes with the help of the Justice Department participants. Three skirmishes erupted between 1st and 5th streets on Grand Avenue as protesters made their way back to Staples Center from Parker Center. At one point, Kenith Bergeron, one of 15 Department of Justice community relations mediators, single-handedly kept it from erupting. He stood between the anarchists and other protesters and the police who were cocking their guns. Bergeron kept saying, "Keep moving, keep moving." They did.
Continuing toward Staples Center, there was more pushing and shoving. Police repeatedly cleared the sidewalk, several time resorting to rough tactics, including hitting demonstrators with batons. Demonstrators who were shoved or struck complained. "Move!" police shouted. "Move!" In response, the crowd chanted back at the officers: "Shame! Shame!" Tensions continued throughout the trek, and once outside Staples Center, erupted again.
As the marchers approached, the protest organizers' white sound truck tried to get through to the demonstration area. Police blocked the way. Tensions rose, and some protesters began throwing plastic water bottles into the police lines. Whitney Zak, from Oakhurst, Calif., pressed close to the police line. She was struck with batons. Another man was lying on the ground screaming, as about half a dozen police hit him with batons. Several observers were shoved to the ground by officers with batons. One, while covering himself, was kicked several times by an officer.

After that spate of violence, police and demonstrators faced off for more than an hour, with protesters split into two groups by the police. Incensed, protesters chanted: "Whose streets? Our streets." Eventually, the police pulled back. As they did, they repeated their request that the crowd proceed into the designated protest area or leave. Protesters rushed into the intersection and cheered, claiming victory. Some entered the protest area. Some left, but some remained in the intersection, leading police to declare an unlawful assembly and to order the remaining demonstrators to disperse. As the incident wound down, one of the best-known people knocked down during the Monday melee emerged to encourage protesters to leave the area. Hearing of the confrontation brewing near Staples Center, homeless activist Ted Hayes rushed over from the Domed Village, an encampment for homeless people several blocks away.
Once there, he got between a group of protesters and police. "We're here for peace," Hayes said. As he walked through the crowd, he was applauded by marchers, partly because he was recognized as one of those injured in Monday night's violence. Some of the demonstrators who were not with Hayes applauded him for his peacekeeping efforts. For five minutes, Hayes tried to coax many marchers in the intersection to follow him up the street. Then, he just began to walk away from the intersection. Many followed. Within a few minutes, the tension had passed. Most protesters made their way to MacArthur Park, where they made plans for Thursday over plates of vegetarian food. Some followed Hayes. Others went home.

I think that wherever the print group decides to locate is up to those involved, but wanted to let you know that a document is on the way that summerizes a meeting a few of us had with Ted last week in which he spoke to clear up some of the rumors, and in which we brokered a media truce, where he would stop bashing activists in the press, especially his generalizations about DAN and D2K. It will be interesting discussion in direct response to the current proposal.
I actually hope that out of it we can see more solidarity with all the groups despite or in spite of some of the personal problems between Ted and others. The organizers of the Homeless Convention have invited all to march and speak at their nightly vigils for which they have permits to get in close to the Staples Center and encircle it in lights. They want speakers from all the groups involved in the Networks to come. They also want support for upcoming events and hope that the media truce will lead to greater trust and participation with others.

While I agree with Jino that Ted is a media hotdog and a hothead,and that trust is an issue, I also think that if the homeless convention planners come even close to the event that they hope for, it would be wrong of the IMC to ignore it, as it deserves to be covered. I recognize, like Chris, the need for strong ties to D2K and DAN, but don't believe this to be mutually exclusive of the print folks locating at the domes, or us covering anything else.
Some of this comes down to the question of who the IMC is in relation to the activist groups it covers. My thought is that how the IMC relates to these groups is to cover their stories... better than the corporate media. We may HOST press conferences, and we may hold seperate IMC meets the corporate press events if we want to, but we are seperate from the activist groups, although we are born out of them.
I believe that we can have the best of both worlds as INDEPENDENT MEDIA people, and to be on good terms with all building bridges and covering the news as we see it.... we are biased, but we acknowledge that bias. That is part of what sets us apart from the corporate media... but the IMC is not meant to be a mouthpiece serving only one or some of the activists, or making decisions along lines of disputes how to cover the issues. If logistics serve to have print elsewhere have at it, but I doubt that our friends in D2K and DAN will shut us out or not be in partnership with us because we are using one building with a DSL line over another. And keeping our plans at the Dome could be strategic and movement building as well as convenient for coverage.

As to the difficult issue of the FNB conflict: Maybe we could have someone pre produce a piece on the feeding conflict of FNB and get their spokes and Ted's folks to tell their stories (and maybe even interview them together so folks could hear each other)

from: chris burnett 7/24/00 i think this is the appropriate time to make a proposal that the Print Affinity Group for the IMC not be associated with Dome Village/Ted Hayes and that we make a strong effort to locate the Print Affinity Group in the IMC.
I support this for the following reasons:

    1. Solidarity with D2k/DAN. It's far more important to me to have a good working relationship with DAN/D2k, rather than threaten this relationship over the use of computers in Dome Village which, i believe, we can supply at the IMC. I would like to see us accomplish both tasks; namely, the creation of an IMC Print Newspaper and the maintenance of our relationship with DAN/D2k.
    2. Past first hand experience of an IMC member with Ted Hayes (i.e. Jino's story). Based on this story, we should not even threaten the IMC's reputation with this kind of politics.
    3. Monetary issues. The IMC is using its name and credibility to raise money to revitalize the LA Free Press in the context of the DNC protests. This is fine, but it's unprecendented. However, if we are asked to do this, we need to think about the IMC first and the context within which it exists; namely, the movement for global justice. If we threaten our relationship with DAN/D2k by staying at Dome Village, we should not be funding the LA Free Press.
-----Original Message----- from: imc-la-admin@regenerationtv.com On Behalf Of Jino C 7/24/00
Some of you may have heard of these rumors such as that Ted Hayes and his crew will be taking pictures of protesters during the DNC and hand'em over to the cops if they were to do anything around the issue of homelessness without his permission, or something like that. This is only a rumor of course but here are the reasons why I wouldn't doubt it if it was true.(I'm not saying that it's true.)
I have had to personally deal with Ted Hayes when members of LA Food Not Bombs were getting arrested last december in Pershing Square for sharing free food with the homeless. At a protest against the mass arrest of FNB members, Ted Hayes also showed up to counter-protest it. We found out that he had talked to city councilwoman Rita Walters before he came and that he was basically spouting the position of the Rita Walter's office while also promoting his dome village to the media that was present. His group continued to harrass us at every serving since then, until of course when the media stopped coming to cover us.

My point is that he is nothing but a media hog that's only concerned about his agenda(national homeless plan)/his rise to power/status. When we tried to talk to him or one of his henchmen it was clear he wasn't listening to anything we said and that he was only interested in his agenda. It basically wasn't acceptable to him that FNB was getting all this media coverage around the homeless issue when in fact he was the head honcho when it comes to the issue and was resentful that he wasn't getting the attention and that we didn't come to him for permssion. (Some of his statements were very territorial, such as "this is our part of town"...etc) It should also be noted that he has close working relationship with city officials and law enforcement agencies. In fact, his National Homeless Plan was signed by LA county sheriff Lee Baca, Gil Garcetti and attorney general Bill Lockyer among others and endorsed by LA county Police Chiefs Association including Bernard Parks. I should also point out that during the time FNB was in litigation with the city(which we won), Ted Hayes had a smear campaign going against FNB passing out flyers containing ludicrous lies about FNB which he also submitted to the city council.

The lesson here that I've learned is that Ted Hayes is a complete wingnut that should not be trusted, who cares more about his status than the homeless and that the best thing to do is to just ignore him without giving him any attention, which is what he wants. One of his favorite tactics, is to make threatening suggestions to some people from an organization without actually making a decent attempt to officially contact the organization and then accuse that organization of not responding to him to get attention from them, as he did with FNB and seems to have done with d2k as well.

Unfortunately the IMC might not be able to just ignore him since the LA Free Press actually has an office inside Ted Hayes' dome village thus creating a possible dependancy in regards to the print group. I would however strongly object to him being given a special treatment because of it and I would almost equate that with the LA Times and the Staples Center scandal if that was to happen.


In the firmament of civil disobedience, Katya Komisaruk is a rising star. Komisaruk, who has a key role in this week's Democratic National Convention protests, first came to public attention a dozen years ago, when as a 28-year-old Berkeley MBA, she took a crowbar to a million-dollar computer at Vandenberg Air Force Base. She believed the computer gave the U.S. the capacity to mount a first- strike nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. Along with wall scrawlings explaining that she acted because she felt a responsibility to prevent nuclear war, Komisaruk left cookies, flowers and a poem addressed to guards: "I have no gun / You must have lots / Let's not be hasty / No cheap shots. Please have a cookie and a nice day."
The nuclear defiance cost her two years in federal prison and was the last of her 31 arrests for acts of civil disobedience while protesting issues ranging from U.S. military involvement in Central America to homelessness. These days, Komisaruk, at 40, has other things to do besides go to jail herself. As an attorney and an organizer, she trains others who are willing to put their bodies where their mouths are to make political points. She makes her home in Oakland, but over the last year, Komisaruk has become an itinerant attorney for activists throughout the country, starting with anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle and Washington, D.C., Republican National Convention-related protests in Philadelphia and now Democratic National Convention demonstrations in Los Angeles.

Her clients are angry about such a wide variety of things--from the death penalty to oil company skull duggery to the spread of biogenetically engineered foods--that they evoke a memorable exchange from the movie "The Wild One," in which Marlon Brando, as the leader of a motorcycle gang, is asked, "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" His answer: "What have you got?" But to Komisaruk, the issues are linked. "It's all one struggle--Teamsters and turtles," she said, referring to labor and environmentalists joining forces to fight corporate greed.
Komisaruk is a woman of bright eyes, open manner and thick black hair cut in a no-nonsense "wedgy." She dresses in business suits when negotiating with government officials, but shorts, sandals and T- shirts when talking to her trainees. Komisaruk is a rarity: Someone who is able to take herself seriously and with a grain of salt. She acknowledges, for example, that her sanctimony level was once off the charts, a characteristic she attributes to "'the zealousness of the newly converted,"' quoting C.S. Lewis. "We thought we would abolish nuclear weapons."

One of her T-shirts advertises "Reasonable Doubt at Reasonable Prices." Actually, she lives on donations as the de facto leader of a loose-knit group called the Midnight Special Legal Collective. The name is taken from a song popularized by folk music legend Leadbelly, who sang about a train that passed a prison where he was incarcerated each night at midnight. Legend had it that if the train illuminated an inmate, he would be the next released. The collective evolved from the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle last fall, where Komisaruk stood for 15 hours in the rain, shouting legal advice to arrested demonstrators whom authorities were holding on a bus. In preparation for this week's protests, Midnight Special rented a three-bedroom, stucco house near La Brea Avenue and Washington Boulevard. It so lacks frills that a wall separating the living and dining rooms has been constructed of cardboard cartons.
Although the house may not look like much, it is the nerve center of the collective's legal operation, whose phone number has been taught to hundreds of protesters in the form of a doo-wop ditty:

Demonstrators also have other places to turn for legal help. The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the National Lawyers Guild are actively monitoring police conduct and defending protesters who are arrested. For Komisaruk, convention week in Los Angeles has been a blur, long days and long nights visiting arrestees in local jails and making her first court appearances stemming from convention-related protests. "I'm representing the first John Doe," Komisaruk proclaimed Tuesday night, referring to a young man arrested at a protest against Occidental Petroleum Corp. on Monday. He was charged with lying on a sidewalk in violation of the municipal code and has refused to give the authorities his name as part of "solidarity" tactics designed to create problems for the court system. Munching on a French-dip sandwich downtown at Philippe on her way to see some arrested protesters at the Twin Towers jail, Komisaruk said the young man is being held on $5,000 bail. Several other individuals arrested in the same demonstration also have refused to give their names to the authorities.
Komisaruk's main advice to protesters has been to stick together and refuse to cooperate with authorities at every turn. At a class at the Convergence Center, a four-story warehouse near MacArthur Park that has served as a sort of unofficial headquarters for demonstrators, Komisaruk offered plenty of do's and don'ts, including an admonition to never touch a police officer or his equipment because it might lead to a criminal charge of battery or resisting arrest. She also taught a group protection technique called "the puppy pile" in which demonstrators who are blocking a street throw their bodies over one another as police move in. She teaches people how to make it as difficult as possible for police to carry them away and even suggests going naked in jail as a way to obstruct the courts.

The basic strategy is to be such a collective pain that jailers, prosecutors and judges will throw up their hands and let everybody go. It worked in Seattle, she said, where more than 500 arrested demonstrators won their freedom while only a handful were taken to trial. Komisaruk has told potential arrestees in Los Angeles that only one trial ended in a conviction for the minor crime of hanging a banner over a freeway. That demonstrator was placed on probation, she said. She also warned that some lawyers who might be appointed by courts to represent them might balk at a collective strategy because they are accustomed to seeing their obligation as one client at a time. Komisaruk sees no conflict between the interests of the individual and the group. Lawyers, she says, "should be advocates for justice and for social change."
"Some of the best organizers in modern times were lawyers," Komisaruk said. "Nelson Mandela is a lawyer . . . Gandhi was a lawyer . . . Not that I would presume to place myself in such exalted company. But having a knowledge of the law certainly enhances your ability as an organizer, and organizer-lawyers add credit to the legal profession." This kind of talk makes the man who defended her in the nuclear case proud. "When I think of Katya," said New York-based attorney Leonard Weinglass, an icon in the world of civil liberties law, "I feel at least some of my work has been really worthwhile. To have a client go from being arrested, convicted, imprisoned and then to law school and now be a lawyer for the poor and disenfranchised, it makes me feel life is worthwhile." Weinglass made the comments Sunday at a rally outside Staples Center for his client Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on Death Row in Pennsylvania for killing a police officer.

Komisaruk was named Susan, Katya is a childhood nickname, and raised in Detroit and San Francisco by politically liberal, but not radical parents. She dropped out of high school at 16 and graduated from Reed College in Portland, Ore., at 19. While in business school at Berkeley, she saw a flier advertising an upcoming demonstration at the Lawrence Livermore weapons laboratory, which is managed by the university. Komisaruk said she had a "political epiphany," decided to join the protest and was one of 1,400 people arrested. Not long afterward, she began corresponding with a nun who was doing time in federal prison stemming from an act of civil disobedience at a government weapons plant.
The nun and her associates provided the inspiration that culminated in Komisaruk's decision to sabotage the computer at Vandenberg. At her trial, Komisaruk was not allowed to mount a political defense. But she made her own closing argument. "You must decide whether an instrument of mass destruction can ethically be considered property," she told jurors. Federal prosecutor Nora Manella countered that it was time for Komisaruk to pay for her crime. "Komisaruk has largely gotten what she has asked for from the system," the prosecutor said. "She sought to make a statement and she did. She sought to destroy an expensive piece of government equipment and she did. She sought to generate publicity and she did." It took jurors only a few hours to render a guilty verdict.
After her release from prison but while still on parole, Komisaruk gained admission to Harvard Law School. She was admitted to the California bar in 1993, despite her arrest record, because she was able to argue that the crimes she committed did not involve moral failings. So far Komisaruk manifests none of the malaise so typical in the legal profession. To the contrary, she brings a joyful spirit to her work that was particularly evident when she linked hands with trainees and launched into a confidence- building song at the end of a training session:


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