United States v. Kelly; United States v. Greenwald; United States v. Bichsel; United States v. Crane; United States v. Montgomery, No. 11-30084 (9th Cir. 2012)
Annotate this CaseDefendants, two priests, an eighty-year-old nun, and two grandmothers, were longtime peace and disarmament activists who cut their way through two fences into a secure area of a naval base. Defendants were subsequently convicted of charges related to their acts of symbolic protest, on the naval base, against nuclear weapons. On appeal, defendants challenged the district court's refusal to dismiss the indictment. The court affirmed the convictions and held that the Hague Convention neither conflicted with nor superseded 18 U.S.C. 1361, 1363, and 1382 and the district court properly refused to dismiss the indictment. The court also held that the jury instructions accurately presented the law to the jury and that a jury could easily have found beyond a reasonable doubt that defendants cut the fences intending to destroy or injure them under 18 U.S.C. 1363. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment.
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