Biography
Vincent Kay was a house painter and poet from New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Covenant Peace Community. After his Plowshares activism he became a beekeeper, maintaining roughly 450 hives across the region under the brand "Swords into Plowshares Honey," sold in local Connecticut stores, restaurants, and Yale's dining halls; he processes the honey at an East Rock workshop.
Trident Nein dates and separate proceedings
Participant Art Laffin dates the action and arrests to July 5, 1982. The contemporary sentencing report dates the original disposition to November 9, 1982. A sentence is not treated as a verified prison-admission date.
The erroneous July 3 admission was removed. Actual initial custody endpoints remain unresolved.
The existing year-only 1983 release remains year precision; it does not establish a single uninterrupted stay or a January 1 release. The unsupported 182-day calculation was removed.
Sources: Art Laffin, July 2022 eyewitness retrospective; Revolutionary Worker, November 12, 1982, pages 1–2.
The March 10, 1983 six-month restitution sentence is recorded as a separate later proceeding, with admission and release unresolved. Source: UPI report in Manchester Herald, March 11, 1983, printed page 4. The report also describes a separate twenty-person vigil arrest; those unnamed custody details have not been assigned to this defendant.
Original archival custody and release evidence
The Nuclear Resister issue 12 names all nine participants and reports seven weeks in jail followed by August 26, 1982 recognizance release. Initial custody is July 5–August 26, not an uninterrupted stay through 1983.
A separate record preserves the November 9 disposition and actual release on 1982-12-23. Issue 13 confirms later confinement, but does not explicitly establish its admission day; sentence day has not been substituted for admission. This later duration remains unknown.
Issue 17 reports release several days after May 27 and before its June 6 publication. The later release therefore uses year precision with a May 28–June 6 research window; January 1 is only a storage placeholder. No exact day or sentence-length-derived release is asserted.
Sources: issue 12, October 18, 1982, printed page 4 (PDF page 6); issue 13, November 30, 1982, page 4; issue 14, January 14, 1983, page 3; issue 15, March 9, 1983, printed page 6 (PDF page 8); issue 16, April 17, 1983, printed page 10 (PDF page 11); issue 17, June 6, 1983, page 5.
Separate April 14, 1981 Hartford protest detention
The May 9, 1981 support newsletter, page 4, names Vincent Kay among eight activists arrested at the United Technologies stockholders meeting in Hartford on April 14, 1981. It reports processing, fingerprints and photographs at Hartford Police Station, followed by release: six on recognizance and the other two within two hours after bail or identification was provided. It does not identify which two faced those conditions. The original breach-of-peace charge became disorderly conduct at arraignment; May 7 was a scheduled pretrial hearing. This distinct brief detention is not merged into the later Trident Nein custody or earlier Plowshares Eight prosecution. No new short-stay case, sentence-service claim or counter is created.
