NEW YORK - Anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan and three co-defendants were found guilty of a minor violation and cleared of more serious charges on Monday for blocking the entrance to the U.S. mission to the United Nations during a protest in March.

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan pauses while demonstrating for the end of U.S. military involvement in Iraq in front of the White House, November 6, 2006. Sheehan and three co-defendants were found guilty of a minor violation and cleared of more serious charges on Monday for blocking the entrance to the U.S. mission to the United Nations during a protest in March. (Larry Downing/Reuters)

The four women, who were fined and told to stay out of trouble with the law, said they would return to the New York City building to deliver a petition calling for an end to the Iraq war.

Sheehan became famous for protesting the Iraq war outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch in 2005 after her soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, and has become one of the country's most recognizable anti-war protesters.

A six-member jury at Manhattan Criminal Court found Sheehan and three other women innocent of resisting arrest, obstruction of government administration and disorderly conduct for a protest at the U.S. mission, which is housed in a privately owned building in Manhattan.

But the jury found the four women guilty of trespassing, a violation.

Prosecutors had sought sentences of five days of community service.

Instead, Judge Kirke Bartley fined them $95 each for court costs and imposed no further sentence on the condition that the women stay out of trouble with the law, saying the night they spent in jail was punishment enough.

"My client does community service every single day and the prosecution just doesn't get it. She spends every day trying to the end war ... in a righteous way, fighting for social justice," said Robert Gottlieb, Sheehan's attorney.

The women had claimed their arrest was an abuse of police power.

"We were not trespassing and we had to spend a night in jail," Sheehan said after the verdict, which the jury reached after deliberating for four hours over two days.

At the trial, police and security officers testified that on March 6, the four women sat down in front of the building and refused to leave when ordered to do so by police.

The women were trying to deliver a petition demanding an end to the war. After being ordered to leave, the women linked arms and legs making it difficult for police to move them.

Prosecutor William Beesch said the women "were not arrested because of their message. It was their refusal to recognize the rights of others that got them arrested."

Immediately after the verdict, the women said they would return to the mission to deliver the petition.

© Copyright 2006 Reuters Ltd

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