Biography
Bruce Beyer (1948-2019) was a Buffalo antiwar organizer and draft resister associated with the Buffalo Nine. Federal agents arrested him during the August 19, 1968 sanctuary protest at Buffalo's Unitarian Universalist Church. He received a three-year sentence in 1969 for assault-related charges arising from the confrontation, then went into exile in Canada and Sweden.
He returned to the United States in October 1977 with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark supporting his case. In his own retrospective account, Beyer said Judge John Curtin later reduced the sentence to thirty days, credited nineteen days already served in 1970, and required him to serve eleven further days at the Erie County Correctional Facility. Those were separate periods of confinement; the years abroad were not time in prison. The exact dates of the later eleven-day period remain unresolved.
Custody research — September 2026
The documented total is 19 days in 1970 plus 11 later days, in separate stays. Exile and the gap between stays are excluded.
