Your Honor, I cannot, in good conscience, object to any sentence which I am given, because I know that even if I was sentenced to a whole 19 years in a D.C. jail -- the length of my life as I know it -- this would still not equal the suffering experienced by tortured detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison, who know not whether their imprisonment will last 19 years or the rest of their lives. There is no end in sight. I came with others to the Supreme Court on January 11, 2008 to demand an end, to bring that end into sight. I did not come because I think it's cool to get arrested and do jail time. The court finds us guilty of demonstrating without a permit and failing to obey police order in this regard and of this we ARE guilty, but this decision overlooks the deeper issue at hand -- the fact that our acts of nonviolent civil disobedience were for a higher cause. Just as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks broke the law for a more noble cause during the civil rights movement, so too are we called upon to act.

Your Honor, if you dismissed me from this stand now as innocent as opposed to giving me jail time, I would have to leave the courtroom just as somberly either way. How can I be happy to be free when prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison face indefinite captivity and no hope of a just trial? If this court has a conscience, certainly it would reverse its decision in order to find the defendants innocent, drop all charges, cease all sentencing, and move instead to place charges against the U.S. government itself for the creation of the Guantanamo Bay prison, and for promoting war, torture and oppression worldwide. I'm worried about the future my generation faces as a result of this court's decision to ignore the real guilty ones and instead sentence the peaceful and loving ones.

We must move forward and keep speaking out on behalf of the voices at the Guantanamo Bay prison that have been silenced. Yes, not only do we have the right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but in the face of such injustices and atrocities we see inflicted on the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay by our government, we have the moral obligation to speak. We will not be silent.

When Judge Gardner asked if Ms. Casale had any questions about her sentence, she said, “Yes, why are you judging the peaceful, not the Bush administration?” Judge Gardner replied, “The Bush administration is not before me; if they came before me, I guess I’d have to judge them.”