HIGH GEAR/NOVEMBER 1977

VICKI GABRINER CASE

By Sarah Holmes and Nancy Lambert

On January 26, 1977, Vicki Gabriner was convicted in Federal Court in Boston, Massachusetts, of passport fraud and conspiracy to commit passport fraud. The charges stemmed from her anti-Viet Nam War activities 3 1/2 years earlier with Weatherman-Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1969-70, and her conviction was the culmination of seven years of harassment by the U.S. government.

At midnight, May 4, 1976, Jill Raymond was released from the Madison County jail in Richmond, Kentucky. She had been held for 14 months without trial and without benefit of appeal for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the lesbianfeminist community Lexington.

in

These cases are significant for those involved in the gay rights struggle. They clearly illustrate the tactics used by the U.S. government in suppressing dissent and in disrupting dissident political organization.

In May of 1973, Vicki was active in the lesbian-feminist community in Atlanta, Georgia. On May 15, one of her housemates, Marianna, left for work as usual at 7 a.m. On the sidewalk in front of her home, she was suddenly surrounded by seven FBI agents. They asked if she were Vicki Gabriner, and then demanded that she let them into the house. When she asked to see a warrant, they laughed, forcing their way inside, where they arrested Vicki.

Vicki's co-defendant, Jimmy Reeves, was arrested in Boston. He was charged with having applied for a passport in a false name in January 1970; she with having signed an affidavit saying she had known the applicant for 2 1/2 years. The passport in question was never issued.

The agents who arrested Jimmy admitted that this was a "nickel and dime" case, and insinuated that the charges would be dropped if he told them about some bombings that had taken place in Boston in the early seventies. He refused to be held hostage for information, and would not talk to them.

In spite of their "nickel and dime" admission, the government has continued to pursue this case relentlessly, thus revealing that their interest in punishing political dissidents is still very much alive. Their interest in the case was probably increased once they realized they had a lesbian-feminist activist on their hands.

tapes cannot be tied directly to Vicki's case, they do identify her as a Weatherwoman, and it is that political identity that lies at the core of this prosecution. Additionally, the FBI has never admitted to having tapped any SDS phones other than that of the national office--an assertion that is hard to believe.

The case was delayed from 1974 through 1976 as the presiding judge, W. Arthur Garrity, was overseeing the busing struggle in the Boston school system. However, he repeatedly denied defense motions for a dismissal of the charges based on the denial of a speedy trial.

The case was finally tried in January of 1977, seven years after the alleged crime. The prosecution made no attempt to prove that Vicki had ever known the applicant's true identity, and thus did not prove that Vicki had committed a felony.

Vicki is centering her appeal on the grounds of: selective insufficient prosecution;

disclosure of illegal electronic surveillance; and insufficient evidence for a conviction. Oral arguments will be heard in Massachusetts the first week in December.

In announcing her decision to appeal, Vicki said, "I see this as one battle in the larger struggle against government repression. It is around these seemingly

unheroic cases that they can easily isolate and pick off activists."

Vicki's case is not particularly dramatic, and it happened a long time ago. By pursuing it for such a long time, the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department and the FBI are letting us know that they intend to nail us any way they can--if not now, then later.

In 1975, at the urging of the ISD; the FBI began intensely questioning members of several gay communities in connection with the search for Susan Saxe and Kathy Power. These antiwar activitists had been on the FBI's "most wanted list" since 1970. Grand juries were subConvened in sequently

Lexington, Kentucky and New Haven, Connecticut. According to the U.S. constitution, grand juries are called to evaluate evidence presented by the government to see if it is sufficient to warrant bringing a person to trial.

The Internal Security Division (ISD) is an investigative agency of the Justice Department which was resurrected and greatly expanded by the White House during the Nixon administration. It was the ISD which initially set in motion the investigations of anti-war the various organizations during the late 60s. This same ISD initiated a wave of grand jury abuse in order to infiltrate and harass gay and other organizations in the

In response to defense wiretap motions, the FBI was ordered to release some of the legallyprocured tapes of conversations from the SDS national office from 1969-70. Vicki listened to these tapes on two separate ocCONTINUED casions, in 1974, and 1977. Although the contentsvel the PAGE 18

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