[Peace-discuss] criminal charges for anti war activity

[C. G. Estabrook]

[NYT article referred to by Peggy Patten on peace list.  --CGE]

April 27, 2003

A Flashback to the 60's for an Antiwar Protester

By LESLIE EATON
 
COLUMBIA, S.C., April 23 — At the time, Brett A. Bursey says, he seemed to
be having a 60's flashback.

There he was at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport with his antiwar sign.
There were the thousands of Republicans gathering to welcome a president.
There were the police officers arresting him for trespassing.

The first time this happened was in May 1969, before a visit by Richard M.
Nixon. The charges against Mr. Bursey were dropped after the South
Carolina Supreme Court ruled that if protesters were on public property —
as the antiwar demonstrators were — they could not be charged with
trespassing.

Last Oct. 24, 33 years later and about 100 yards away, the now graying Mr.
Bursey was again arrested for trespassing, this time before a visit by
President Bush. The charge was soon dropped.

But last month, the local United States attorney, J. Strom Thurmond Jr.,
brought federal charges against Mr. Bursey under a seldom-used statute
that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas the president
is visiting. He faces six months in jail and a $5,000 fine.

This being South Carolina, Mr. Bursey's story includes lots of colorful
history, old grudges and improbable plot twists, not to mention the
Confederate battle flag.

But to some legal experts it is also part of a growing pattern of
repression against protesters, demonstrators and dissenters. The American
Civil Liberties Union says it has found many examples, like increased
arrests and interrogations of protesters and the shunning of celebrities
who have opposed the war in Iraq.

"When you connect the dots, you see very clearly a climate of chilled
dissent and debate," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the
civil liberties group.

In particular, Mr. Romero said, there is a growing practice of corralling
protesters in "free-speech zones," which are often so far from the object
of the protest as to be invisible. "It's an effort to mitigate the
effectiveness of free speech," he said.

And he does not buy the argument that such zones are necessary to protect
the president and other officials. "John Hinckley wasn't carrying an
anti-Reagan sign when he shot him," Mr. Romero said.

It was just such a "protest zone" that got Mr. Bursey in trouble last
fall. A spokeswoman for the airport said officials there had established a
protest area on the verge of a highway, a good half mile from the hangar
where the president would be speaking. (Airport police are not sure if
anyone actually protested at the official zone, she said.)

Mr. Bursey hoped he and some friends could protest somewhere closer, maybe
across the road from the hangar, he said. The police in Charleston and
Greenville had been accommodating, he said, when he had asked to avoid the
protest zones, which he described as being "out there behind the coliseum
by the Dumpsters."

It did not work this time.

"We attempted to dialogue for a while, them telling me to go to the
free-speech zone, me saying I was in it: the United States of America,"
Mr. Bursey said. Finally, he said, an airport policeman told him he had to
put down his sign ("No War for Oil") or leave.

" `You mean, it's the content of my sign?' I asked him," Mr. Bursey said.
"He said, `Yes, sir, it's the content of your sign.' "

Mr. Bursey kept the sign and was arrested; he said he watched Air Force
One land from the back of a patrol wagon and spent the night in the county
jail.

A Secret Service agent was present at the arrest, Mr. Bursey said, but he
added that no one could have seen him and his companions as a security
threat. "There was no one under 50 in that crowd," said Mr. Bursey, who is
54. "In my mind, at that time, we didn't pose a security threat; we posed
a political threat."

A spokesman for the United States attorney's office, Scott N. Schools,
said the message on the sign was not the problem. "It's not the fact of
what Mr. Bursey was doing," Mr. Schools said. "The problem was where he
was doing it. That's the basis of the prosecution."

Mr. Schools did allow that federal prosecutions of protesters at
presidential events had been rare.

Since 1992, only a dozen cases involving this part of the United States
Code, Section 1752 of Title 18, have been referred to federal prosecutors
by the Secret Service and other government agencies, according to TRACfed,
a database of federal enforcement information at Syracuse University.

Most of those referrals were dropped; three resulted in trials or pleas
(the best known was the prosecution of a mentally ill and heavily armed
man who tried to hand-deliver a letter to President Bush at his Texas
ranch).

Mr. Schools said he could not comment on why the government was taking the
unusual step against Mr. Bursey, but he said it would become clear at the
trial, which is likely to be in the next month or two.

"Nobody's seen a case like this before," said Bill Nettles, a former
public defender who is on Mr. Bursey's legal team. "I have to wonder if
some of it's not Brett."

By this he means Brett Bursey the local character, professional protester
and liberal voice in a conservative state (he's a vegetarian in the land
of pork barbecue).

Since 1968, "I've been a political organizer," Mr. Bursey said. "That's
been my job, that's been my mission. I've at least been diligent at it."

The son of a Navy dentist, Mr. Bursey has a life story compelling enough
to be a novel. And at least some of it appears to be; anyone who has read
Pat Conroy's 1995 best seller "Beach Music" will remember the student
radicals who tried to destroy a draft board office, only to discover at
trial that one of their leaders (and friends) was a government agent.

That happened to Mr. Bursey, and he ended up spending almost two years in
the penitentiary for malicious destruction of property — as he puts it,
for spraying "Hell No We Won't Go" on walls. But not before he spent some
time hiding in New York City (he says his family feared he would be killed
in prison). Then he was arrested in Texas for buying 500 pounds of peyote
buttons, but beat that charge on a technicality, he said.

Indeed, he has been arrested so often that although he thinks the first
time was when he burned a Confederate battle flag, he is not sure. "Lordy,
it was such a busy time," he said. "My chronology has been kind of messed
up."

Unlike most of his peers, Mr. Bursey never got a nine-to-five job; instead
he founded "progressive" organizations and started an alternative weekly
newspaper. And he protested against things: nuclear power, nuclear
warheads, government corruption and, of course, the aforementioned
Confederate battle flag, which until two years ago flew on the dome of the
Statehouse here.

Columbia, however, is not exactly a protest-friendly town, especially
these days.

Yellow ribbons are everywhere, from the airport to the Statehouse to
Angeline's Beauty and Wig Salon on Assembly Street. Instead of advertising
sandwich specials, the sign outside a Wendy's reads "Support Our Troops."
And plenty of people remember Mr. Bursey's youthful transgressions,
including the county sheriff, who arrested him at the airport in 1969.

"I've told Brett that in this climate, in this state, there is a real
possibility that he gets convicted," said Mr. Nettles, the lawyer.

In the current case, he plans to argue that the federal statute is
unconstitutional as it applies to Mr. Bursey, who he said was not the only
person in the area the Secret Service says was restricted; the others, he
says, were mostly Bush supporters. And Mr. Nettles said he was surprised
that the federal prosecutors had not tried to drop or settle the case,
which is attracting attention to his client and his views.

"If they really wanted to torture Brett," he said, "if what they really
wanted was to take his voice — they'd dismiss it."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company