Maryknoll nun prepares for prison stay after SOA trespass conviction

Published: 2005-01-31

MARYKNOLL, N.Y. (CNS) -- Maryknoll Sister Leila Mattingly is going to jail. She just does not know precisely when. But when she does go, it will be for six months. Sister Mattingly, 63, was sentenced Jan. 25 to six months in prison following her misdemeanor trespass conviction for stepping over the property line during a 16,000-strong protest in November at Fort Benning, Ga., home to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, once known as the School of the Americas. The institute is a training facility for foreign military personnel. For the past 14 years, it has been the site of annual protests by demonstrators who link its graduates to human rights abuses committed over the past two decades by government security forces in Latin America. According to the U.S. government, only a small number of those who have attended the institute were ever involved in criminal activities. "I believe that I followed my conscience and my sense of moral outrage by prayerfully and peacefully protesting," Sister Mattingly said at her sentencing hearing in Columbus, Ga.

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