New Haven: Mark Colville served 18 months in jail for his 2018 protest of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and he’s still battling what he considers an idolatrous government.
Because he refuses to submit to drug tests or consent to disclosing his finances, Colville faces a hearing that could end up with his being put back in jail for violating the terms of his supervised release.
Colville was one of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, who entered the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia on April 4, 2018. Colville poured blood, hammered and wrote biblical texts on the monuments to the Trident D5 nuclear missile and was arrested, tried and convicted.
Since his release from the jail in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Sept. 10, 2021, however, he and his family also have been dealing with a more personal issue: his son Isaiah’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“It was diagnosed right about the time I was getting out of prison, so it was a big shock,” Colville said. Isaiah Colville, 19, will have his last chemotherapy treatment Monday, and the journey his family has taken has been complicated by the elder Colville’s legal issues.
“It’s a very aggressive form of cancer,” Mark Colville said. “You get tumors that grow very quickly, but the treatments, the chemotherapy regimen, is also very effective.” According to Luz Catarineau, Isaiah’s mother, the treatment gives her son an 80 percent chance of a cure. “But it’s still a very aggressive form of cancer. He’s not out of the woods yet,” Colville said.
Colville’s hearing originally was scheduled for early December. “We asked for a postponement until my son’s treatments were done … and the court wouldn’t give me that, the government wouldn’t agree to a postponement that long.” He was given until this past Monday.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic’s latest surge gave Colville some legal breathing room. The federal court moved its hearings to video conferencing, and Colville would have to consent not to meet U.S. District Judge Michael Shea in person.
He wouldn’t do that, forcing another extension to Feb. 4, past his son’s final treatment.
“Under any circumstances … this looks like it’s a process that could end up sending me back to prison,” Colville said. “So I have an apprehension about not speaking to this person in the flesh, partly because I’ve never met him before. But the fact is that everybody has a constitutional right to appear in person before the judge. And in order for me to do the hearing by video conference, I have to give up that right.”
He would have to sign a form and answer questions before the hearing began “to make sure that I agree to give up my constitutional rights to be seen in person. I simply decided that I wasn’t going to give up that right. … The exercising of this right gives me a delay,” at least until his son finishes chemotherapy.
Even so, Isaiah Colville will undergo “a bone scan and a bunch of other tests that are scheduled now for the same day that I’m appearing in court, Feb. 4,” Colville said.
“I’m particularly concerned about the prognosis for my son,” Colville said. “That’s going to be followed by a whole bunch of medical tests and screenings which will indicate what, if any, further treatment he needs. And so our future is very uncertain. As is his own future, and so this is a horrible time to risk being separated from family again.”
A man who strictly follows his Roman Catholic faith, Mark Colville knows that his actions to protest the United States’ nuclear weapons program, which he says is both immoral and illegal under international law, will complicate life for his family. He and Catarineau already open the Amistad Catholic Worker house on Rosette Street to the needy — or they did before the pandemic.
Now, a warming tent is being prepared in the back yard with a fire pit, and the house is being renovated to better serve people. Colville said they are trying to discern “what hospitality means” in the era of COVID.
“It’s not unusual that our personal life, our family life, gets wrapped up in our neighborhood life or our ministry life, and of course the legal problems that we have based on trying to resist violence and war,” Colville said. “That’s familiar, but this is a scary situation for us. It’s particularly frustrating for me because I’ve tried to act responsibly with regard to the government right from the beginning.”
During Colville’s trial, the judge “affirmed repeatedly that … my actions were religiously motivated by sincerely held religious beliefs,” Colville said. But the jury was told not to consider his beliefs. Also, the question of whether nuclear weapons are legal was ruled to be irrelevant. He said he could prove they are illegal based on a United Nations treaty and the Constitution.
But even though he was sentenced to 21 months in prison (18 months served before his conviction), three years of supervised release and $33,000 in restitution (which the group can share), the only requirements he’s refused have been the drug tests, which he said at least one co-defendant was not asked to submit, and the giving up of his financial records, because he said that would make him complicit in the nation’s idolatry of nuclear weapons.nhregister.com
