Biography
Sister Megan Gillespie Rice SHCJ was an American Roman Catholic nun of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a missionary teacher who spent four decades teaching children in Nigeria and Ghana, and after returning to the United States in the 2000s became a full-time anti-nuclear activist with the Nevada Desert Experience and the Plowshares movement. She had been arrested at the Nevada Test Site, the U.S. Army School of the Americas, and elsewhere more than forty times by her seventies.
In the early hours of July 28, 2012 — the day before the Hiroshima anniversary — she, Vietnam veteran Michael Walli (then 63), and former U.S. Army officer Greg Boertje-Obed (then 57), all three Catholic peace activists, cut through three perimeter fences and walked into the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Y-12 is one of the United States' most heavily guarded weapons-grade uranium storage facilities. They reached the wall of the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility, hung peace banners, splashed human blood on the walls, painted slogans, and read a statement aloud while waiting for security to arrive. The action, which exposed catastrophic security failures at the facility, became known as the Transform Now Plowshares.
The three were charged with sabotage and depredation of government property. On May 9, 2013 a federal jury in Knoxville convicted them on both counts. On February 18, 2014, U.S. District Judge Amul Thapar sentenced Rice — then 84 years old — to 35 months in federal prison. On May 8, 2015, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the sabotage conviction and ordered the three released for time served on the lesser depredation count. Sister Megan was freed after roughly two years in federal custody. She died on October 10, 2021 at age 91.
