October 1, 2007
Waukegan—This morning in the Illinois 19th Circuit Court, Associate Judge Patrick Lawler acquitted me of trespassing and resisting arrest — charges dating back to July 2006 when I was reporting on a war protest at the Military Entrance Processing Command (MEPCOM) at the Great Lakes Naval Base.
Today’s bench trial was postponed several times at the request of either the court or prosecution, and this was the fifth time I had to appear in Waukegan, about 30 miles north of Chicago.
Frankly, the police and prosecutor had no case from the beginning, but it was a handy way to make life difficult and expensive for someone covering a war protest without “FOX News” or “CNN” pasted on a camera.
The protesters, members of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, had just finished a month-long, 320-mile walk from Springfield, Illinois, to the Navy base north of Chicago. Their walk ended up at MEPCOM, the national command center of the military’s processing stations for recruits, where three “Voices” members out of a group of 25 people walked onto the parking lot, knelt down, and began reading the names of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis killed in the war.
After I took four pictures of Jeff Leys, Ceylon Mooney and Diane Hughes getting arrested, a Navy security officer told me to leave or I would also be arrested. I left immediately, took a few more pictures from outside the fence, and stood on the sidewalk observing the others. About 10 minutes later, Officer “Friendly” McCorkle approached, said he wanted to see my camera, and ask some questions me over at his patrol car. When we reached his car, he told me that he had been told by other security officers that I had trespassed onto the parking lot to take photos.
The long story made relatively short is that Friendly felt like being a tough guy that day and I was a handy target. Statements from a security officer called to the stand contradicted McCorkle regarding the trespassing charge, and the judge determined the resisting arrest charge had no merit.
Officer Friendly McCorkle did not say he would put all the overtime money he made sitting around in courtrooms into a special fund for wayward cops.
