Biography
John Shiel was a Jonah House antiwar protester imprisoned at the D.C. Detention Center for a 1981 White House blood-pouring action. The December 12, 1981 National No-Nukes Prison Support Collective newsletter individually identifies the action and his ten-month sentence; its January 17, 1982 issue reports him still imprisoned. Initial admission, actual release, exact statutory charge and completed time served remain unverified. His name is preserved as printed; no unverified spelling variant is made an alias.
Karl Smith’s first-person account in the March 9, 1983 Nuclear Resister names John Shiel among seven Capitol rotunda antiwar protesters who refused a $10 bond and were held overnight before arraignment the next afternoon. The printed account calls the arrest January 20 and also places it hours before the State of the Union; the official Reagan Library dates that address January 25, 1983. The precise arrest day is therefore unresolved. The sixty-day sentences imposed on Smith, Rumpf and Frank Carver were suspended, not sixty days actually served.
Source and evidence limits
National No-Nukes Prison Support Collective newsletter No. 10, January 17, 1982, original page 2.
Actual physical imprisonment is explicitly reported, not merely arrest or a future sentence. The publication date is not an intake date. All individual custody endpoints and exact served counters remain unknown. No birth date, race, ethnicity or unsupported alias is inferred.
Contemporary anti-nuclear custody report
The Washington D.C. jail roster lists John Shiel (ten months), Mike Miles (six months), and Carl Smith (six months), all due out April 18, 1982. The April 18 date was still a forecast in this April 15 issue, not a report of actual discharge; no release date or served duration is inferred from it. Carl/Karl spelling is retained with the separately established identity, not treated as a new person.
National No-Nukes Prison Support Collective newsletter No. 11, April 15, 1982, original pages 2.
Karl Smith’s first-person account in the March 9, 1983 Nuclear Resister names John Shiel among seven Capitol rotunda antiwar protesters who refused a $10 bond and were held overnight before arraignment the next afternoon. The printed account calls the arrest January 20 and also places it hours before the State of the Union; the official Reagan Library dates that address January 25, 1983. The precise arrest day is therefore unresolved. The sixty-day sentences imposed on Smith, Rumpf and Frank Carver were suspended, not sixty days actually served.
The Nuclear Resister No.15, March 9, 1983, PDF pages 13.
