From the Jails to the Streets to the Courthouse

In the firmament of civil disobedience, Katya Komisaruk is a rising star.

Komisaruk, who has a key role in this week’s Democratic National Convention protests, first came to public attention a dozen years ago, when as a 28-year-old Berkeley MBA, she took a crowbar to a million-dollar computer at Vandenberg Air Force Base. She believed the computer gave the U.S. the capacity to mount a first-strike nuclear attack against the Soviet Union.

Along with wall scrawlings explaining that she acted because she felt a responsibility to prevent nuclear war, Komisaruk left cookies, flowers and a poem addressed to guards: “I have no gun / You must have lots / Let’s not be hasty / No cheap shots. Please have a cookie and a nice day.”

The nuclear defiance cost her two years in federal prison and was the last of her 31 arrests for acts of civil disobedience while protesting issues ranging from U.S. military involvement in Central America to homelessness.

These days, Komisaruk, at 40, has other things to do besides go to jail herself. As an attorney and an organizer, she trains others who are willing to put their bodies where their mouths are to make political points.

She makes her home in Oakland, but over the last year, Komisaruk has become an itinerant attorney for activists throughout the country, starting with anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle and Washington, D.C., Republican National Convention-related protests in Philadelphia and now Democratic National Convention demonstrations in Los Angeles.

Her clients are angry about such a wide variety of things--from the death penalty to oil company skull duggery to the spread of biogenetically engineered foods--that they evoke a memorable exchange from the movie “The Wild One,” in which Marlon Brando, as the leader of a motorcycle gang, is asked, “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” His answer: “What have you got?”

But to Komisaruk, the issues are linked. “It’s all one struggle--Teamsters and turtles,” she said, referring to labor and environmentalists joining forces to fight corporate greed.

Komisaruk is a woman of bright eyes, open manner and thick black hair cut in a no-nonsense “wedgy.” She dresses in business suits when negotiating with government officials, but shorts, sandals and T-shirts when talking to her trainees.

Komisaruk is a rarity: Someone who is able to take herself seriously and with a grain of salt. She acknowledges, for example, that her sanctimony level was once off the charts, a characteristic she attributes to “‘the zealousness of the newly converted,”’ quoting C.S. Lewis. “We thought we would abolish nuclear weapons.”

One of her T-shirts advertises “Reasonable Doubt at Reasonable Prices.”

Actually, she lives on donations as the de facto leader of a loose-knit group called the Midnight Special Legal Collective. The name is taken from a song popularized by folk music legend Leadbelly, who sang about a train that passed a prison where he was incarcerated each night at midnight. Legend had it that if the train illuminated an inmate, he would be the next released.

The collective evolved from the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle last fall, where Komisaruk stood for 15 hours in the rain, shouting legal advice to arrested demonstrators whom authorities were holding on a bus.

In preparation for this week’s protests, Midnight Special rented a three-bedroom, stucco house near La Brea Avenue and Washington Boulevard. It so lacks frills that a wall separating the living and dining rooms has been constructed of cardboard cartons.

Although the house may not look like much, it is the nerve center of the collective’s legal operation, whose phone number has been taught to hundreds of protesters in the form of a doo-wop ditty:

For legal help at the DNC,

Doo-wop doo-wop,

Call Midnight Special at three-two-three,

Doo-wop, doo-wop.

Nine-three-nine, three-oh-three-nine.

We’re all law,

All the time.

Demonstrators also have other places to turn for legal help. The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the National Lawyers Guild are actively monitoring police conduct and defending protesters who are arrested.

For Komisaruk, convention week in Los Angeles has been a blur--long days and long nights visiting arrestees in local jails and making her first court appearances stemming from convention-related protests.

“I’m representing the first John Doe,” Komisaruk proclaimed Tuesday night, referring to a young man arrested at a protest against Occidental Petroleum Corp. on Monday. He was charged with lying on a sidewalk in violation of the municipal code and has refused to give the authorities his name as part of “solidarity” tactics designed to create problems for the court system.

Munching on a French-dip sandwich downtown at Philippe on her way to see some arrested protesters at the Twin Towers jail, Komisaruk said the young man is being held on $5,000 bail. Several other individuals arrested in the same demonstration also have refused to give their names to the authorities.

Komisaruk’s main advice to protesters has been to stick together and refuse to cooperate with authorities at every turn.

At a class at the Convergence Center, a four-story warehouse near MacArthur Park that has served as a sort of unofficial headquarters for demonstrators, Komisaruk offered plenty of do’s and don’ts, including an admonition to never touch a police officer or his equipment because it might lead to a criminal charge of battery or resisting arrest.

She also taught a group protection technique called “the puppy pile” in which demonstrators who are blocking a street throw their bodies over one another as police move in. She teaches people how to make it as difficult as possible for police to carry them away and even suggests going naked in jail as a way to obstruct the courts.

The basic strategy is to be such a collective pain that jailers, prosecutors and judges will throw up their hands and let everybody go.

It worked in Seattle, she said, where more than 500 arrested demonstrators won their freedom while only a handful were taken to trial. Komisaruk has told potential arrestees in Los Angeles that only one trial ended in a conviction for the minor crime of hanging a banner over a freeway. That demonstrator was placed on probation, she said. She also warned that some lawyers who might be appointed by courts to represent them might balk at a collective strategy because they are accustomed to seeing their obligation as one client at a time.

Komisaruk sees no conflict between the interests of the individual and the group. Lawyers, she says, “should be advocates for justice and for social change.”

“Some of the best organizers in modern times were lawyers,” Komisaruk said. “Nelson Mandela is a lawyer . . . Gandhi was a lawyer . . . Not that I would presume to place myself in such exalted company. But having a knowledge of the law certainly enhances your ability as an organizer, and organizer-lawyers add credit to the legal profession.”

This kind of talk makes the man who defended her in the nuclear case proud. “When I think of Katya,” said New York-based attorney Leonard Weinglass, an icon in the world of civil liberties law, “I feel at least some of my work has been really worthwhile. To have a client go from being arrested, convicted, imprisoned and then to law school and now be a lawyer for the poor and disenfranchised, it makes me feel life is worthwhile.” Weinglass made the comments Sunday at a rally outside Staples Center for his client Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on Death Row in Pennsylvania for killing a police officer.

Komisaruk was named Susan--Katya is a childhood nickname--and raised in Detroit and San Francisco by politically liberal, but not radical parents. She dropped out of high school at 16 and graduated from Reed College in Portland, Ore., at 19.

While in business school at Berkeley, she saw a flier advertising an upcoming demonstration at the Lawrence Livermore weapons laboratory, which is managed by the university. Komisaruk said she had a “political epiphany,” decided to join the protest and was one of 1,400 people arrested.

Not long afterward, she began corresponding with a nun who was doing time in federal prison stemming from an act of civil disobedience at a government weapons plant.

The nun and her associates provided the inspiration that culminated in Komisaruk’s decision to sabotage the computer at Vandenberg.

At her trial, Komisaruk was not allowed to mount a political defense. But she made her own closing argument. “You must decide whether an instrument of mass destruction can ethically be considered property,” she told jurors.

Federal prosecutor Nora Manella countered that it was time for Komisaruk to pay for her crime. “Komisaruk has largely gotten what she has asked for from the system,” the prosecutor said. “She sought to make a statement and she did. She sought to destroy an expensive piece of government equipment and she did. She sought to generate publicity and she did.”

It took jurors only a few hours to render a guilty verdict.

After her release from prison but while still on parole, Komisaruk gained admission to Harvard Law School.

She was admitted to the California bar in 1993, despite her arrest record, because she was able to argue that the crimes she committed did not involve moral failings.

So far Komisaruk manifests none of the malaise so typical in the legal profession. To the contrary, she brings a joyful spirit to her work that was particularly evident when she linked hands with trainees and launched into a confidence-building song at the end of a training session:

“If Martin Luther King can go to jail,

“Then I can do it too.

“Just tell my friends,

“They can send my mail

“Care of the L.A. County Jail. . . .”