Antinuclear Activist Files Suit in Federal Court to Liberate Her Goats;
Claims State Department of Agriculture and Attorney General William Tong Committed Fraud Upon Connecticut Court

Nancy's goats ate maple leaves not because they were malnourished but because they love them!

CONTACT: Nancy Burton 203-313-1510 NancyBurtonCT@aol.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: JANUARY 2, 2023

Antinuclear activist Nancy Burton has brought suit in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut seeking immediate release of all the goats seized from her Redding property on March 10, 2021 and dismissal of state proceedings on grounds of fraud upon the Court committed by the Commissioner of Agriculture and Attorney General William Tong and two of his assistants.

The case is entitled Nancy Burton v. William Tong et al., 3:22-CV-01591-OAW.

No hearing date has been set.

The suit asserts that Burton’s goats – participants in the Mothers Milk Project which she co-founded to sample goat milk for radioactivity – were seized in retaliation for her antinuclear activism.

It seeks dismissal of state court proceedings on grounds the state defendants committed fraud upon the Court.

Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Harding asserted in a court petition that the goats were mistreated; however, the petition fails to identify a single goat supposedly mistreated, as required by law, and as a result and for other reasons the Connecticut courts lack jurisdiction.

Harding, announced his resignation from the office on December 29, 2022, thirteen days after the suit was filed.

State Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis denied Burton’s motion to dismiss the case on such basis without conducting the mandatory hearing or allowing evidence.

Burton staunchly counters that she devoted her heart, her soul and her resources to the goats and, indeed, the state’s own witness testified that the goats did not suffer any perceived medical or health issue supporting the seizure, the pre-requisite for the court to have jurisdiction.

Many of Burton’s goats have died while in state confinement, kept under deplorable conditions of overcrowding, nursing infants separated from their mothers and all the goats deprived of any human contact for 17 hours straight every single day, including goats in labor.

The federal defendants have barred Burton from inspecting the goats or having her experts inspect them and they have withheld critical information from her and the state court.

The case alleges that Tong, through his deputies and through his personal oversight, committed a fraud upon the Court to obtain temporary custody of the goats after an abbreviated hearing on a relaxed standard of evidence by making false assertions to achieve their underlying objective: remove Burton from circulation by blasting her reputation with outrageous, false allegations and sickening insinuations which she had no reasonable opportunity to dispute during the abbreviated court hearing.

Burton’s expert witness, a 20-year veteran animal rescuer with a sterling reputation, Rosa Buonomo, whose Litchfield sanctuary Stoney Brook Farm Animal Rescue, Inc., is 501(c)(3) certified, testified in full support of Burton but the Court gave her little time and completely disregarded her testimony, which was unopposed by expert testimony.

Tong engaged in an unusually personal attack against Burton in a press release he issued December 6, 2022; Burton’s suit contends the press release was deliberately false, defamatory and unprecedented and issued from a misperception that his conduct was above the law.

The matter is unfolding just as both the state and federal governments are revving up to promote a renewal of and expansion of nuclear power in Connecticut.

In March, the state legislature acted to rescind the 1979 law placing a moratorium on new nuclear power construction in Connecticut. Millstone Units 2 and 3 are the sole operating reactors today.

Burton has been a key player in a decades-long statewide campaign as co-founder of the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone, mounting numerous legal challenges opposing a federal license extension, expansion of the Millstone Unit 2 spent fuel pool, firing of nuclear whistleblowers and violating the federal Clean Water Act by corrupting the discharge permit renewal process. A former reporter with The Associated Press who practiced law for 20 years, Burton's antinuclear work was all pro bono publico. Although never the subject of a complaint by a client, she was disbarred when she raised issues of misconduct by members of the judiciary; she was told she could be reinstated if she withdrew the charges while doing so would have been equivalent to committing perjury.

The Coalition took up the cause of a little boy whose mother swam in Niantic Bay every day to promote her good health, unaware of Millstone’s continuous discharges of radioactive and toxic waste discharges to the Bay and its surrounding public beaches. He was born with cancer in his jaw. Renowned Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Helen Caldicott spoke at a press conference with the little boy, linking his cancer with Millstone releases. The Coalition donated signs to the Selectmen of East Lyme to post at the Hole-in-the-Wall Beach warning of the health risks, but the Selectmen hid the signs in a Town Hall closet and called the police who, unbeknownst to the Selectmen, pulled Burton aside and offered her their encouragement.

Burton succeeded in 1999 in persuading a state court judge to keep Millstone Unit 2 shut for 10 days – an unprecedented act costing the plant’s owner an estimated $1 million per day – to spare losses to the indigenous fish population which would otherwise be sucked into the plant’s intake structure and destroyed, hastening the subspecies’ march to extinction.

The state’s lead attorney opposing Burton and her environmental-activist clients in the case, Fish Unlimited v. Northeast Utilities Service Company, Inc., CV-99-058927-S, and sharing a counsel table with Millstone’s attorneys, was Matthew Levine, who has since been elevated to deputy attorney general and is lead attorney in the case against Burton and her goats. Levine is a defendant in Burton v. Tong.

Among other facts, the federal complaint asserts that Tong and his staff members Levine and Harding willfully withheld from their witnesses the facts and significance of an investigation report by the then-state veterinarian, who, after evaluating all of Burton’s goats and her goat care and inspecting her property, dismissed a neighbors’ complaint as unwarranted on June 15, 2018, concluding that Burton provided all appropriate care to the goats and all were healthy.

Burton’s neighbor, Elinore Carmody, agitated the community and news media with absurd claims about the goats, such as that the goats made loud noises because Burton was physically abusing them when in fact the goats were in a breeding cycle when such goat sounds are normal and Burton’s property is zoned for agricultural uses. Carmody roused the town with false accusations the goats were “malnourished” on grounds she observed them eating leaves and pasture vegetation, which are essential to goats’ unique digestive processes.

Carmody messaged death threats to Burton and harangued state court personnel.

Carmody also allied herself with then-State Senator Will Haskell, who wrote an inflammatory letter to Agriculture Commissioner Bryan Hurlburt complaining that Burton kept more than 100 goats. At his deposition, Haskell walked his comments back, admitting he counted only two dozen goats during his single 20-minute observation from Carmody’s property and that he knew “nothing” about goats nor their natural behavior and made no effort to contact Burton before demanding that Hurlburt remove Burton’s goats.

Carmody gained news media entree by introducing herself as the first publisher of the short-lived “George” magazine launched by John F. Kennedy, Jr.; As publisher, she was charged with selling advertising space, frequently to liquor manufacturers. However, as advertising sales declined, she was “let go” and the magazine soon folded.

Burton adopted Katie the Goat (www.Katie.the.Goat.org) when she discovered the state had been monitoring her milk for radioactivity when she grazed five miles downwind of Millstone nuclear power station in Waterford, Connecticut. Her milk contained alarming concentrations of radioisotopes routinely released by Millstone into the air and accumulating in the environment as fallout.

Katie gained fame when she visited the State Capitol for a press conference about her contaminated milk and later to the White House in 2012 after then-First Lady Michelle Obama, through her press office, graciously declined Burton’s offer to adopt one of Katie’s granddaughters as a White House pet and personal radiation monitor, while praising the Mothers Milk Project as “fantastic” in its mission and wishing it success.

Katie died of thoracic cancer shortly thereafter.

Burton was still operating the Mothers Milk Project (www.MothersMilkProject.org) when her goats were seized and expanding it geographically to create a database of goat and human milk sampling to raise public and governmental awareness of the science-based reason to shutter nuclear power plants: to safeguard the public health. After the nuclear defense industry, health care – much of it cancer-related - is southeastern Connecticut’s largest employer. Many of the milk samples from goats as well as humans contained strontium-89 and strontium-90. Strontium-89 is considered a definitive marker for a nearby recent release as it has a very short half-life.

Honoring Justice Dennis Eveleigh

      On November 10, 2022, Hon. Justice Dennis Eveleigh ordered the Connecticut Office of the Attorney General to take all necessary steps and precautions to preserve the lives and good health of all the goats seized by the Connecticut Department of Agriculture from Nancy Burton on March10, 2021 until further order.
      Justice Eveleigh, retired Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, entered the order during a preargument conference over which he presided at the New Haven Superior Court.
      The Mothers Milk Project and all the innocent and much-loved goats recognize and honor Justice Eveleigh for his outstanding and enlightened action.

Nancy Burton
Co-Founder Mothers Milk Project
MothersMilkProject.org
Posted: November 14, 2022

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Why are these goats calling out "I can't bleat"?

Why is this person smirking? Return to this site as this ghastly true story of official animal cruelty and public corruption in Connecticut unfolds...

We launched the Mothers Milk Project with a press conference in New Canaan CT on June 5, 2008 with the help of three goats – Cindy-Lu and her kids, Hannah and Henry - and two young breastfeeding mothers.
The goal: to draw attention to the scientific link between the routine 24/7 releases of radiation to the air by the two Indian Point (“IP”) nuclear reactors and the disturbing high incidences of cancer occurring downwind of the Hudson River plant.

     Neither New York State nor IP’s owners ever sampled goat milk; milk sampling was limited to one dairy farm five miles to the northeast. Milk sampled from that location between 1982 and 1992 spiked at 14 picocuries per liter of Strontium-90 in 1983 and 7.25 in 1991, when the dairy farm closed. Human breast milk was never sampled. The Mothers Milk Project stepped in to fill the information vacuum. (The nuclear industry itself credits goat milk as the most reliable biological indicator of radiation in the environment.)
      We set up colorful and fun exhibitions at Pete Seeger’s annual Clearwater and Strawberry Festivals with our beautiful goats and their nursing kids. (See photo display above) The child-friendly exhibit encouraged lactating mothers to donate samples of their breast milk for analysis at an independent laboratory. Many did. Along with the goat milk, human mothers’ milk samples came back with measurable levels of the two radioisotopes we tested for– strontium-90 and strontium-89 – released during routine nuclear power plant operations.
      For example, breast milk from a Hudson River Valley mother in 2009 had a concentration of 3.3 picocuries per liter of strontium-89. Because strontium-89 has a half-life of only 50 days – half of its radioactivity has decayed by the 50th day – its presence and detectability in a human milk sample is a scientifically conclusive indicator that the milk was contaminated with radioactivity by a recent fission event not very far away – where else but Indian Point?
With the radiation releases come heightened cancer levels: cancer incidence in Fairfield County, Connecticut – closest to Indian Point - was 8 per cent and 7 per cent above the U.S. rates for males and females respectively; the Fairfield County cancer death rate for those under 25 was 4 per cent above the U.S. rate.

VICTORY: INDIAN POINT TO PRMANENTLY SHUT DOWN ON APRIL 30, 2021!

     As we continued testing goat and human milk, we called for the shutdown of Indian Point. The good news: Indian Point Unit 2 permanently shut down in 2020; Unit 1 had shut down in 1974. As of this posting – April 24, 2021 – Indian Point has six days to go before it too is permanently shut down following waves of civic activism and New York State’s tough stand on IP’s Clean Water Act permit (denying renewal because its once-through cooling system was outmoded and environmentally destructive). Visit Riverkeeper.org to watch a real-time historic second-by-second countdown to shutdown.

NOW: MOTHERS MILK PROJECT TAKES ON MILLSTONE!

     Mothers Milk Project now focuses on the Millstone nuclear power station in Waterford, Connecticut, notorious for its excessive radiation releases and the high cancer rates in the communities surrounding Millstone (not to mention its Clean Water Act permit, recently renewed by DEEP despite its use of the same cooling technology as New York State declared was too antiquated and environmentally destructive).
      Connecticut’s DEEP (Department of Energy and Environmental Protection) has discontinued what had been a decades-long program of sampling dairy cow and goat milk and having it analyzed for radioactivity levels. The winner? Millstone and its investors. The losers? The public, especially women and children, the most vulnerable, living nearby.
      Goat milk which had been sampled at a location in a residential neighborhood five miles downwind of Millstone was alarmingly high in strontium-90 concentrations, recorded as high as 44.4 and 55.5 picoCuries per liter; cancer cases plague the neighborhood.
      Equally alarming, the last data released by DEEP dated October 3, 2017, recorded a concentration of .48 picoCuries of strontium-89 from goat milk collected two miles downwind of Millstone in a residential neighborhood in Waterford. The data also revealed sr-89 concentrations in four other goat milk samples from the same location: 2.00, 1.00, 2.00 and 1.00. Repeat: sr-89 is exceedingly difficult to detect and measure because of its brief half-life.
DEEP has terminated its cow and goat milk sampling because it claims it is unaware of any lactating cows or goats grazing within 10 miles of Millstone. (For years, DEEP used to sample cow/goat milk at locations beyond 10 miles from Millstone, frequently reporting positive results.)
      Time for the mothers and the goats in Connecticut to step in: especially those living downwind of Millstone in southeastern Connecticut.

If you are a lactating mother and would like to have your milk tested for sr-90 and sr-89,

please contact us at: info@mothersmilkproject.org.
If you have a goat or would like to adopt a goat to contribute goat milk samples,

please contact us at: info@mothersmilkproject.org.
If you are not a lactating mother and cannot adopt a goat but still want to help, please make a financial donation and mail it to:

Mothers Milk Project, c/o Nancy Burton, P.O. Box 227, Redding Ridge CT 06876
And please follow this site for updates!

Mothers Milk Project is Launched:

PRESS CONFERENCE New Canaan, Connecticut
June 5, 2008
 
      The Mothers Milk Project is being launched on June 5, 2008 to begin a systematic sampling of mothers milk produced by humans and other mammals living within 50 miles of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Station in Buchanan, New York.
      Indian Point's owner and the New York State Department of Health stopped sampling cow's milk near Indian Point in 1991 and have never tested human breast milk.
     The project is an unpredecented campaign to create a database of findings of the potential presence of radioisotopes in milk of mammalians, including humans, near the nuclear power plant.
      Indian Point, in common with all nuclear power plants, is designed to routinely release fission products into the air. These include strontium-90, which has a half-life of 30 years and remains biologically active for 600 years. Strontium-90 mimics calcium in its chemical composition and is readily taken up by bone cells and teeth, where it continuously emits pulses of energy which disrupt the functions of nearby cells. Strontium-90 exposure is linked to bone cancer, leukemia, diseases of the immune system and cancer of soft tissue including breast and lung. Strontium-90 is only one of more than 100 radioisotopes routinely released by Indian Point. All are carcinogens and all.are most harmful to young children and developing babies.
      We encourage breastfeeding mothers to participate in this program by donating a cup of their breast milk monthly. Each sample will be divided into four parts: one for the New York State Department of Health, one for Entergy, Indian Point's owner, one for the project's independent laboratory, and one to be retained by the project. There is no cost and all samples will be taken confidentially with results anonymous.
The Mothers Milk Project will also include dairy cow and goat milk samplings. Other mammals may be included as well.
The Mothers Milk Project is designed to inform the community about a known hazard - radiation - which is insidious because it cannot be seen, tasted, smelled or detected except with sophisticated equipment and which is biologically harmful at any degree of exposure.
Please return to this website for future updates.

To donate milk to the Mothers Milk Project, email us!  DONATE@mothersmilkproject.org

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Legendary songwriter Pete Seeger joined Mothers Milk Project leaders as they accepted a donation of mother's milk at the Strawberry Festival in Beacon, New York on June 15, 2008

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