Biography
Sister Joyce Horbach, born Coletta Horbach on March 23, 1916, was a member of the Sisters of St. Francis of Dubuque and a longtime peace-and-justice activist. She entered Offutt Air Force Base during the Feast of the Holy Innocents peace witness on December 28, 1981 and was detained for several hours. Horbach returned for the August 9, 1982 Nagasaki Day action and received probation. Her Franciscan community later remembered six arrests and her continuing participation in peace demonstrations, including annual School of the Americas protests. She died March 5, 2015. A contemporary December 1983 report separately documents a November 15 sentence and her actual jail admission on November 28, 1983, to serve an imposed 25-day term for repeated entries at Offutt. Her actual release date from that stay remains unverified.
Brief initial military detention verified
The original NuclearResister010printed3 was fully visually reviewed. It supports initial military custody only; later probation is not treated as incarceration.
Separate November 1983 jail admission
Nuclear Resister no. 22, December 16, 1983, page 5, individually reports that Sister Joyce Horbach began serving a 25-day sentence on November 28, after November 15 sentencing for repeated entries at Offutt Air Force Base. The complete original page and dated cover were visually inspected using the PDF review workflow. This supplies an actual jail-entry day, not merely an arrest or sentence date.
A separate 1983 case preserves these dates without changing the earlier military-detention and probation cases. The imposed 25 days are not entered as time actually served, and no release is calculated by adding them to the admission. Her actual discharge remains unverified. The later community obituary mentions a 35-day sentence without enough chronology to equate it with this episode.
