Drone protester gets brief reprieve

By Lori Sonken

Jamesville Correctional Facility administrators in Onondaga County gave Ithaca resident Mary Anne Grady Flores a choice. She could either visit her mother in hospice care or attend her funeral. But she couldn’t do both.

 

An inmate at Jamesville, Grady Flores opted to see her mother, Teresa, alive. On Feb. 26, the jail staff drove Grady Flores about 56 miles from the jail in East Syracuse to Ithaca to give Grady Flores what may be her last moments with her 88-year-old mother. She arrived unexpected—the jail did not want to notify her family about the upcoming visit. Used to seeing “beat up Volvos” park in front of their home, the family did not recognize the unmarked vehicle outside. When Clare Grady realized her sister was home, she jumped up and down in excitement and told her mother.

 

Clad in shackles with tears streaming down her face, Grady Flores was able to see her mother and say a few things before her mother dozed off. Then, Grady Flores returned to jail to continue serving a six-month term that began Jan. 19.

 

The Gradys are leftist Catholics, reflecting the spirit of Dorothy Day. They question U.S. military values. They care for the downtrodden. Now deceased, John Grady, father to Mary Anne, was one of 28 war resisters, named the Camden 28, who U.S. government’s policies in Vietnam. In 1971, they were charged with conspiracy to remove and destroy files from the draft board, FBI office, and the Army Intelligence office; destruction of government property; and interfering with the Selective Service system.

 

The defendants pleaded guilty to the charges. But they asked the jury to “nullify the laws” against breaking and entering and to acquit them as a means of saying that the country had had enough of the “illegal and immoral” war in Vietnam. The jury returned a not guilty verdict for all 28. A Navy veteran and Fulbright scholar, John Grady eventually came to Ithaca with his family and taught at Ithaca College.

 

Like her father, Grady Flores has a history of challenging U.S. military policy. “Our media does not show any of the dead in the newspapers. That is why drone warfare is so convenient for the makers. We can do the killing from afar. We don’t have the body bags coming back like we did during Vietnam. We don’t have war correspondents with tears in their eyes, as you would see during Vietnam. There is little challenging of war policy done by our media,” she said in the summer 2014.

 

On May 16, 2014, Grady Flores was found guilty of criminal contempt in the second degree for violating an order of protection requiring her to stay away from Col. Earl Evans who works at the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base.

 

Until her trial Grady Flores had never met Evans. But she and others associated with the Ithaca Catholic Worker, Syracuse Peace Council, Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars and other groups oppose the reaper drones piloted from the Hancock base that kill terrorists and innocent victims in such places as Afghanistan and Pakistan. To express their opposition, they regularly protest at the base. Evans asked for the order of protection to keep the protesters away from the base, according to statements he made in a deposition and at Grady Flores’ trial.

 

On Feb. 13, 2013, Grady Flores went to the Hancock base to take pictures of a drone protest occurring in the roadway. She was arrested, found guilty and originally sentenced by Justice David Gideon in the Town of DeWitt Court to a year in jail. On appeal, the Onondaga County court upheld her conviction but reduced her sentence to six months.

 

When she arrived in jail, she had her own cell with a desk. But after a few days she was told she was “bunkable,” meaning she wasn’t a threat so she did not require her own room. The 59-year-old grandmother talks with her podmates (most if not all are younger then she is) about drones and she attends bible study class.

 

Grady Flores has received hundreds of letters in the two months she has been incarcerated. Friends have also contributed funds to help pay for her telephone calls, food purchases from the commissary and her mother’s care.

 

Tompkins County resident and Cornell faculty member Darlene Evans has visited Grady Flores several times, most recently on Feb. 28. Another Ithaca visitor and friend, Adelaide P. Gomer, president of the Park Foundation, was was reportedly turned away because of a metal plate in her body. There are many rules on visitations. For example, a hug and kiss between an inmate and outsider can only happen briefly at the beginning and end of a visit. Inmates are not allowed to hold babies and toddlers.

 

Due to good behavior, Grady Flores is now allowed five visits per week.

Her release date is May 6, but she could get out earlier. Her attorney, Lance Salisbury, has filed an appeal with the New York State Supreme Court and asked that she be released on bail until the court decides her case.

 

In a letter to friends and supporters, Grady Flores says, “The main points of my appeal challenge the validity of the orders of protection that have been given to 50 people, including myself. These orders of protection have been designed to block our First Amendment right; to ask our government to redress our grievance, specifically, to end the killer drone policy, which killed over 6,000 people in 2015 alone. As Colonel Evans, who requested the original 17 orders of protection, including mine, testified during my trial, he just wanted the protesters away from his base.”

 

Grady Flores hopes to return home to see her mother again. She has remorse, but not about her protest activities. She’s remorseful about her country what she says is its perpetuation of violence and injustice at home and around the world.