Magistrate Dismisses Charges Against "Vandenberg 15"
Catherine Swysen, partner at Sanger Swysen & Dunkle, prevailed in obtaining a dismissal for her client, Daniel Ellsberg, as part of a team of attorneys representing protesters accused in federal court of trespassing at Vandenberg Air Force Base to protest the February 25th launch of a Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile from Vandenberg to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. On October 17, 2012, United States Magistrate Judge Rita Coyne Federman dismissed all charges against the protesters, known as the "Vandenberg 15." Mr. Ellsberg, the nuclear weapons strategist who released the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, had come to Vandenberg to draw public attention to, protest, and help to terminate the deployment by the U.S. of first-strike weapons that endanger the security of the U.S. and of the world.