Video: 'John Lennon & Yoko Ono Press Conference, bar association, NYC, April 2, 1973)
(Monday, April 2, 1973, 10:00 a.m. EST) — Former Beatle John Lennon, announcing the appeal of an order to leave the United States by May 21, 1973, sought today to show that the U.S. Justice Department’s legal arguments in the action against him had made it “not just John-and-Yoko case” but one where “many cases hinge on the outcome.”
The 32-year-old writer and former Beatle was ruled deportable by an Immigration Service judge on March 23, 1973, because of a 1968 British conviction on a charge of possession of hashish. His wife, Yoko Ono, an artist, and filmmaker was granted permanent resident status.
The couple, who have been living in New York City since 1971, discussed the appeal at a news conference at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, located at 42 West 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
Lennon called the ruling “strange” and “not humane,” inasmuch as a Texas court, in granting Ono custody of her 9-year-old daughter by a previous marriage, specifically mentioned Lennon in finding hers to be a “proper household.”
“We will always be together,” Lennon said with his arm around his wife. She, he added, has taught him that the United States is “a place to be in, rather than just scoot in and out with the loot.” Neither Ono nor the Texas court has been able to find her daughter, Kyoko, who is believed to be with the child’s father.
Leon Wildes, the lawyer for the Lennons, said one basis for the appeal was that their search for Kyoko was “a position they’ve been put in by the law” “ and should have led the Immigration Service to seek “a humanitarian solution to a human problem.”
A second basis, he said, is that Lennon was denied due process because the British conviction would not hold up in an American court. He said the British arresting officer had since been indicted on charges of perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
A third basis, he said, is that the law under which Lennon was ruled deportable specifies Illicit possession of narcotic drugs or marijuana” and neither mentions hashish or cannabis resin, by name nor defines marijuana.
Expert witnesses testified at the Lennon hearings, Wildes said, that hashish is not a narcotic and that, while marijuana is also a product of the cannabis plant, “cannabis resin is not marijuana.”
“Since deportation visits great hardship upon an alien,” the Lennon notice of appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals says, “the language used by Congress should be strictly construed and any doubt as to its meaning resolved in favor of the alien.”
In an interview after the news conference, Wildes put it another way: “TheImmigration Service says it must deport Lennon because of a technicality, so let’s get technical about cannabis resin, too—even if Congress forgot about it and left it out of the statute.”
The lawyer said that another client of his, an Australian, was “finally” sworn in as a citizen yesterday after “another technicality”: his marijuana conviction was found to be not for possession, but for use, which was not mentioned irk the immigration law.
Wildes noted that a bill now before Congress, introduced by Representative Edward I. Koch of New York and Senator Alan Cranston of California, both Democrats, would allow the Attorney General of the United States, at his discretion, to admit to residency persons convicted of marijuana possession.
The lawyer called the deportation proceedings “a triumph of trivia.” Lennon said he would label them “bureaucracy fumbles on.”
He said that he and his wife did not now consider their case “a special cause” of the Nixon Administration, although their supporters have attributed it to their antiwar activities.
“I feel the Government is not really aware of us as people,” he said. “We’re something that makes a noise and doesn’t fit in, and they think they’ve got enough of them.”
Concerning the immigration judge’s suggestion that she was perhaps not searching hard enough for her daughter, Ono said: “We are not free to really explain publicly how we are looking for her.” Her voice was so nearly inaudible that her husband pushed her long dark hair away from her face.
Lennon, who wore a bead-and-coin necklace, said his badge reading “Not Insane” was for the “National Surrealist People’s Party. Acting on “what we call a mind game, invented by Ono, they passed out a “birth announcement” of Nutopia, “a conceptual country [with] no laws other than cosmic…no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.”
With a characteristic instinct for showmanship, they each whipped out a white tissue and said, “This is the flag of Nutopia—we surrender, to peace and to love.”
Then Lennon blew his nose on it.
