On May 17th 1968, Daniel Berrigan—Jesuit priest, poet, and peace activist—his brother Phillip and seven other Catholic clergy and laypersons entered the Selective Service board in Catonsville MD, removed hundreds of personnel files for the draft to Vietnam and incinerated them with home-made napalm. The resultant legal proceedings inspired Berrigan's documentary verse drama, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970), which raised an apostolic protest against the American government's exploitation and depredation of the earth, its people and its resources. Versifying the activists’ courtroom utterances, which resound in a scriptural or prophetic key, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine gestures towards both secular and religious forms of self-abnegation, but certain reviewers objected to the play as a self-aggrandizing dramatic hagiography. These reactions register a tension between doctrines pertaining to Christian martyrdom and the liberal ideology to which the canonical works of jurisprudential drama adhere, celebrating the victory of the individual conscience. Locating this paradox— whereby, in Terry Eagleton’s words, the “vulnerable victim… appropriates [his/her] infirmity… [and] embark[s] on a transition to power”—in the trial of Christ, this chapter treats the crucifixion as foundational both to hagiographic drama and its development into the legal-dramatic forms of modernity.