War Protester Unrepentant Despite Languishing in Jail : Dissent: Mary Lopez poured blood on the Federal Building. At a hearing, her beliefs led to a longer term.

Once, Mary Byers Lopez wore a nun’s habit. Sister Mary Ethel, the schoolchildren called her.

But by the time the short and stout 59-year-old stood before U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson, she was in drab prison blues, a chain encircling her waist, her wrists cuffed to the chain.

She was a convicted felon who was not about to say she was sorry.

Mary Lopez, anti-war activist, had already spent 60 days confined by the sleek white walls of the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, in a women’s unit populated by alleged drug dealers, fraud artists and an occasional murder suspect. In the case of the United States of America vs. Mary Lopez, she had pleaded guilty to the willful destruction of federal property. She had poured blood and oil on the steps of the downtown Los Angeles Federal Building in a series of protests against the Persian Gulf War.

On this day in April, Lopez was expecting Wilson to let her go home. The court’s probation office had said 60 days was sufficient, and the prosecutor concurred. Besides, the war had been over for two months and Lopez had had her fill. Civil disobedience was one thing, she contends, martyrdom another.

But Lopez, who represented herself in court, was determined to speak her piece. And by the time the hearing was over, Wilson ordered her to serve another 60 days.

Amid the parades celebrating victory and the homecoming of the troops, Lopez is among an unknown number of activists nationwide who continue their protests behind bars. Two of her cohorts in Los Angeles’ small Catholic Worker community, perpetrators of the blood-and-oil protests, also are facing extended punishment. Lopez says it is true they wanted to go to prison--and equally true they got more than they bargained for.

“Oh, I have no desire to be Joan of Arc,” Lopez said in an interview inside the federal jail. “Believe me. I hate being here. I hate it with a purple passion and, really, when I got that extra 60 days, it took me about a week to adjust to it.”

Various credits have shortened Lopez’s sentence, and she is expected to be released today. Meanwhile, activist George Manley-Gil pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for his role in the protest and has two months left on his three-month sentence. Fellow protester Sandy Huckaby, 42, was sentenced Monday to two months in prison. The judge agreed to let her begin her term on July 4. “I thought it was real appropriate,” Huckaby said. “Independence Day and all that.”

As members of the Catholic Worker movement, Lopez, Manley-Gil and Huckaby follow a code requiring the rejection of material values in a life of service to the poor. For them, protesting United States militarism is a logical complement to the soup kitchen and health clinic they operate on Skid Row. In the tradition of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, they practice nonviolent civil disobedience to attract attention to what they see as injustice.

The Catholic Worker ethic encourages resistance to what they perceive as a corrupt system. That is why, after Lopez’s second arrest, she refused to pay a $1 bail offered by a judge. To pay it, she explained, would be to finance and cooperate with “the system.”

When activists conceived the blood-and-oil protests, Catholic Worker member Jeff Dietrich said they realized they could face as much as six months in jail. Nonetheless, the sentences given Lopez and Manley-Gil gave them pause.

“We’re not standing around being crybabies about this,” Dietrich said. “ . . . But we were a little shocked and a little surprised that the war is over, the troops are home, and our people are still in jail. . . .

“But we’re happy to continue the protest.”

Dietrich and Curt Grove had been released after 53 days in jail. They expected Lopez to receive similar treatment. Court officers suggest that Lopez would have, if only she had said the right words, or said nothing at all.

Judge Wilson: Would it be your intention to indicate your protestations in this fashion in the future?

Lopez: Absolutely. Sir, what I am trying to say is this. Somebody in this country has to stand for peace and give an example to our children. . . . I have a heavy heart because I have spent almost 60 years practicing works of mercy. I’ve taught, I’ve counseled, I have fed the hungry and clothed the naked. . . .

This is a felony and I wonder why. I listened very closely when Oliver North admitted to perjury in front of Congress, to destroying government documents, and I know that he served not one day in jail . . . .

Mary Lopez says she wasn’t always such a radical. As a young nun teaching at St. Mary’s High School in Chandler, Ariz., she ordered State Department films to help her students understand why so many young men were going off to Vietnam.

“I was gung-ho for the Vietnam War,” she recalled. “I was red, white and blue, and the government could do no wrong. If they did it, it was all right. So I can understand people who come from that point of view. . . . And it was students who taught me it was wrong. They opened my eyes.”

But she did not protest the war, not openly. Her activism focused instead on the cause of migrant farm workers. In 1975, she left teaching for a job with the United Farm Workers. And after 25 years as a nun, she left the order for one farm worker in particular. She was 45 when she became Mary Lopez.

The marriage lasted 11 years. By then, the union job had brought her to Los Angeles. After leaving the UFW, she worked at the South Central Family Health Center, where she has been for the past two years. The Persian Gulf War--and the fact that she knew she would be spending weeks, if not months, in jail--prompted her to quit the clinic.

Lopez’s last anti-war crime came on the afternoon of Feb. 22. She and a man identified in court documents as “John Doe” poured ashes on the Federal Building steps in the shape of a cross. Then Doe, described by Lopez as a military deserter, laid his I.D. tags beside the ashes. As federal police moved in, Doe poured five gallons of dirty motor oil on the cross and Lopez poured a pint of human blood. It was her own blood and that of volunteers, drawn by a nurse sympathetic to the cause. (Doe, released after his arrest, is a fugitive.)

Without seriously challenging prosecutors’ claims, Lopez and other activists steadfastly questioned whether their actions actually constituted the damaging of federal property. After all, they watched as janitors poured used sand to absorb the goo, then swept and shoveled the stuff away.

The courts agreed--at least initially. Lopez had been in jail for three days when Magistrate John R. Kronenberg rejected the prosecutor’s complaint and set Lopez free.

But prosecutors persisted. Federal officials say cleansing the granite terrazzo steps also required sandblasting, and the disposal of the oil, blood and sand required the services of a hazardous-waste removal firm. Officials estimated the Feb. 2 cleanup expense at $800; an amount exceeding $100 constitutes a felony. Prosecutors took the complaint to Judge Dickran Tevrizian, who issued a warrant for Lopez’s arrest.

As it happened, federal officers arrested Lopez the day after President Bush ordered a cease-fire. She had returned to the scene of the crime, this time to join a prayer service to mourn the dead and ask for peace.

Lopez does not seem to question whether she is more good to society inside or outside of prison. To her, it all fits together. She suggests that money put into bombs “kills twice,” devastating the unfortunate souls both abroad and at home.

“In our clinic we had a little 12-year-old boy who died. He went to the emergency room of county hospital and he had to wait eight hours. If he had been seen in six hours, he would have lived. He just had to wait so long, he had a massive brain hemorrhage and he died. . . .

“I just see it every day. I see these homeless families in the streets. The drive-by shootings and all these other problems. . . .

“We’re so busy putting all of our abilities into war. It’s horrible. It’s criminal. It’s sinful. It’s an outrage.”

Judge Wilson: Would you commit a crime? . . . Let’s say this country went back into Iraq and had another confrontation. Would that justify it?

Lopez: Wholesale murdering of innocent men, women and children, yes, would merit it. Children are still dying. Children are still dying. Saddam Hussein is still living and the children are still dying.

In one hearing, Judge William D. Keller ordered prosecutors to report whether Mary Lopez required a psychiatric examination.

“To the contrary,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael Reese Davis responded in a brief, “the defendant’s course of conduct to date indicates her rational, conscious decision to spend time in custody in an apparent attempt to sensationalize her protestations to the government’s past policies in the Persian Gulf. All of the defendant’s actions and statements to date exhibit her clarity of mind and purpose.”

Lopez says she now understands, too well, the way prison is “deadening to the spirit.” She shares a floor with about 70 other women. A pool table gets some use, a Ping Pong table is ignored. There is not much to do but watch TV and read romance novels.

Lopez says she has organized prayer services and learned a few prison survival tricks. During a recent “shakedown,” she reports, guards seized her stash of contraband packets of jelly and sugar. But she managed to hide her extra blanket. Inmates are allowed only two, but it gets cold, she says.

In a way, Lopez says, Judge Wilson made his point. Going to prison will be harder next time, she says, because she’ll know what to expect.

Which, she adds, is not to say there won’t be a next time.