The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
December 19 1988
The courtroom in Washington DC was tense and quiet. On his bench, Judge Herbert B Dixon was stoney-faced. All eyes were on the witness box, where a frail woman with a handsome face and long brown hair was speaking in a voice which kept sagging and breaking under the weight of her feelings.
“I will not compromise,” she said. “I know that I have done the right thing and I know that I will go on doing the right thing.”
These were not the words that Judge Herbert Dixon wanted to hear and so, when she had finished speaking, he sent her to prison. Prison is a familiar place to Dr Elizabeth Morgan. She has been locked up in a cell in the Washington DC Jail for the last 16 months, even though she has been convicted of no offence.
It was Judge Herbert Dixon who sent her there in the first place, in August 1987. He cannot have realised then that by doing so he would turn himself into a national bogeyman and convert Dr Morgan into a symbol of defiance whose case has become a cause celebre.
Dr Morgan was a successful plastic surgeon with a string of degrees from Harvard, Yale and Oxford, a lucrative practice in Washington DC, a husband and one small daughter, Hilary. Her troubles started when she and her husband, who is also a doctor, decided to get a divorce.
During 1985, a bitter custody battle developed in which the central issue was a claim by Dr Morgan that her husband had sexually abused Hilary. Her husband vehemently denied the claim. The child supported the claim, but her father said it was untrue, and that Dr Morgan was manipulating the child into telling lies. Judge Herbert Dixon considered both sides of the story and ruled that Hilary should continue to see her father while the issue was resolved. Reluctantly, Dr Morgan handed Hilary, then aged four, over to her father for more visits. Frantically, Dr Morgan then reported that the abuse was continuing.
Early in 1987, a jury finally considered the issue and ruled that there was no evidence of abuse. Dr Morgan appealed, complaining that crucial evidence including Hilary’s own account of events, had been held back from the jury. Judge Herbert Dixon ordered that, pending the appeal, Hilary should continue to see her father. This time, Dr Morgan dug in her heels. She refused to produce Hilary. The judge insisted and threatened to jail her. Dr Morgan said she would rather go to jail than surrender Hilary to her ex-husband. In the summer of 1987, Dr Morgan sent Hilary into hiding. In August, Judge Herbert Dixon sent Dr Morgan to jail for contempt of court.
Since then, Dr Morgan’s attorneys have filed numerous suits to get her released, while her husband’s attorneys have filed just as many suits to try and force her to disclose Hilary’s whereabouts. Hilary remains hidden. Dr Morgan remains in jail, utterly defiant.
Along the way a psychiatrist who examined Hilary has said the child is suicidal and developing a split personality under the pressure of the alleged abuse, while Dr Morgan’s new fiancee, who happens to be a senior Federal Court judge, has testified that “there is nothing I have ever done in my life that I regret more” than persuading Dr Morgan to co-operate with the court in allowing Hilary to go for the early visits with her father.
Last week, Dr Morgan emerged from her prison cell for the hearing in Judge Herbert Dixon’s court. She refused to back down and said she was prepared to stay in prison until Hilary becomes an adult in 12 years time. She quoted an essay by Henry Thoreau on civil disobedience to explain her belief that she has a moral right to disobey immoral law. “I consider it immoral for courts to send abused children back to their rapists,” she said.
Numerous womens groups and civil rights organisations have now come to her aid. Her supporters cheered her as she was led away to jail again. A Harvard law professor has compared her action to “civil disobedience in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King”. She is believed now to have served longer in jail than anyone else who has ever been jailed in the USA for contempt, including Mafiosi who have been jailed for refusing to give evidence in gangland trials.
But even as her determination singles her out, Dr Morgan is joined by other women who, in entirely separate cases, are engaged in a similar defiance. While there are few current examples of American men fighting for a cause with such determination, there is a striking trend for women to preserve pockets of dissent. Although the women concerned are pursuing very different goals, they are united by their willingness to sacrifice their comfort and convenience for the sake of their beliefs
There is the striking case of Joan Andrews, a pacifist who has been campaigning against abortions. After entering abortion clinics in Florida and trying unsuccessfully to wreck the machinery, she was charged in March 1986 with criminal mischief. At her trial, she refused to undertake not to repeat the offence and was jailed for five years. On the same day the same judge sentenced two men who had confessed to being accessories to murder to four years.
In prison in Florida, Joan Andrews refused to co-operate with the authorities. She would not sign registration documents or provide personal details. When guards tried to strip search her, she fell down limp. She was punished with solitary confinement. Although she is a practising Catholic, the prison refused to allow her to go to Mass in the prison chapel but told her officially that she was allowed to pray in her cell.
Her family successfully petitioned for her to be moved to a less strict prison in their home state, Delaware. Joan Andrews refused to go. She said Florida had treated her unjustly and deserved the burden of dealing with her defiance. The Attorney General of Delaware, Charles Oberly, said he thought her jail sentence was absurd. “Florida has been trying to break her,” he said. “She’s no danger to the system. She won’t escape. Yet a Florida official said of her: `She’s going to play by our rules – or else.’” Joan Andrews continues to defy them.
In Kentucky, federal jail officials have just been castigated for persecuting two women prisoners over their political beliefs. Both women belonged to revolutionary groups and are serving long sentences for conspiring to engage in political violence. When they continued to advocate their radical views in prison, they were moved to a special high-security unit in Lexington, where they lived in underground cells in a regime which included 24-hour electric light and video surveillance of their every move, solitary confinement, random internal searches conducted by male guards and regular strip searching.
A federal judge found that the two women had been “singled out for advocating ideas disagreeable to the Government” and that the object of their treatment had been to compell them to renounce their views. The treatment – which the judge said “skirted elemental standards of human decency” – had, however, failed. The two women continued to stand by their beliefs. They have now been moved out of the special unit on the orders of the court with their beliefs intact.
There are the five dissident Carmelite nuns who barricaded themselves into their monastery in New Jersey in early October to protest that their traditionally austere way of life was being diluted by a new prioress.
There is an upsurge of dissent among lesbians focussed on the case of Shraon Kowalski, a Minnesota woman who was paralysed and rendered speechless in a car crash five years ago. Her lover, Karen Thompson, a college professor, has been barred from seeing her by her family who deny that Sharon was ever her lover. The courts have supported the family. But Karen Thompson has continued to fight; womens groups have organised vigils in 21 cities to mark Sharon’s 32nd birthday and have set off a barrage of law suits.
The defiant dissent of women like these is particularly noticeable here for two reasons. First, dissent is, in general terms, at a low ebb. There is no alternative press; there are few street demonstrations; with a few notable exceptions such as Noam Chomsky, there is no dissident intelligentsia; there is little political activity of any sort outside the mainstream which is itself narrow.
Secondly, women are, in general terms, as locked out of political activity as the ethnic minorities and the poor. It was striking that after the exhausting marathon of primaries, the candidates for the Presidency and the Vice Presidency were all white and all men and all millionaires. Ronald Reagan never had more than one woman at any time in his Cabinet. George Bush has appointed only one woman to his new Cabinet, although there are reports that he may appoint a second.
In the meantime, Dr Elizabeth Morgan has won her appeal against the jury which ruled that there was no evidence that her daughter had been abused. From her cell in DC Jail, she is preparing to fight a re-trial.
UPDATE: Elizabeth Morgan spent 25 months in jail before being released by a special act of Congross. Her daughter, Hilary, was finally traced to New Zealand where she and Dr Morgan were allowed to remain. The underlying allegation of sexual abuse was never finally proved or disproved.
