Heather G. Doyle
Prince Frederick, MD – A Calvert County jury found a woman opposed to a major construction project guilty of a single count of making a false statement to a police officer Friday, May 27 following a three-day trial. The defendant—Heather G. Doyle, 32 of Washington, DC, immediately began serving her sentence. Circuit Court Judge Marjorie Clagett sentenced Doyle to three months in jail, suspending all but 15 days, 240 hours of community service and two years of supervised probation.
The charge against Doyle stems from a February 2015 incident in which she and another woman climbed a construction crane for the purpose of attaching a banner to it. The incident occurred at a site in Lusby used for the construction of a liquefaction unit at Dominion Cove Point Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Plant in Lusby. The banner read “Dominion get out. Don’t frack Maryland. No gas exports. Save Cove Point.”
Doyle and the other protester—Carling Sothoron, 29 of Baltimore—were arrested at the scene. The pair’s crane-scaling protest was announced as it was occurring by officials from Stopping Extraction and Exports Destruction (SEED). In a post on SEED’s web site, activists stated, “the climbers’ lives were jeopardized when law enforcement officers tried to remove them from the crane in an unsafe way.”
Following a hearing before a District Court judge in April 2015, Doyle, who declined probation before judgement, began serving a 40-day sentence at Calvert County Detention Center. While Doyle was behind bars, SEED sent out information to the media accusing several police officers of assaulting the women during the arrest. When a formal complaint was subsequently lodged, authorities filed charges against both women of making a false statement to police. Sothoron’s case is currently on the court system’s stet docket.
In a hearing held two weeks before the trial, Doyle refused the state’s offer to place the case on the stet docket in exchange for the defendant’s writing of two letters of apology to two of the officers she named in the assault complaint.
Doyle did testify and was questioned during the trial.
A call to Doyle’s attorney, Sean R. Day of Greenbelt, had not been returned as this story was being filed.
Previous stories regarding the crane incident
http://www.thebaynet.com/articles/0415/craneclimbersaccusecopsofassault.html
http://www.thebaynet.com/articles/0415/craneclimberssentencedonegoestojail.html
http://www.thebaynet.com/articles/0516/plantprojectfoerejectspleaagreement.html
Contact Marty Madden at marty.madden@thebaynet.com