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94 Years in Prison for Reporting Federal Abuse? More Fall out From Standoff in Burns, Oregon

March 13, 2017

/by April Kiessling

A flurry of dramatic property and civil rights-related trials is taking place across the western U.S. in federal courts, in which defendants, including independent media representatives, are charged with up to 17 crimes each, from trespass to terrorism. All the accused had confronted or ignored law-enforcement officers in group protests in either 2014’s Bunkerville, Nevada, confrontation or 2016’s similar standoff in Harney County, Oregon. Both showdowns were responses to perceived overreach of federal bureaucracies – chiefly the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Since 1994, the Bundy family of Bunkerville, Nevada, had grappled with authorities over grazing rights in contested areas near their land. On April 5, 2014, hostilities erupted into open conflict resembling a range war. Armed Bureau of Land Management employees and rangers removed and shot the family’s cattle, supposedly as a way of recouping fees the federal government claimed rancher Cliven Bundy owed. Masses of protesters, some armed, stood in open confrontation with federal and local law enforcement for a week, until the BLM finally backed down and left. Two years later, treatment of the Hammond ranching family in Burns, Oregon, triggered the occupation of the nearby Malheur Wildlife Refuge starting Jan. 2, 2016, and lasting 41 days. The main cause of the protests was the re-imprisonment of ranchers Dwight Hammond, 74, and son Steven, 47 – after they had already completed their original sentences. The Hammonds had been charged and convicted under the “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996,” when back-fires they started spread onto federal lands. Even the Hammond case presiding judge, Michael Hogan, claimed both the severe “terrorism” criminal charges and mandatory minimum five-year sentence the statute imposed were excessive, and in fact that imposing such a long sentence “would shock the conscience to me.” Nevertheless, after serving relatively short sentences and being released from prison, the federal government doubled down on the “terrorism” charges and appealed the sentence – winning on appeal due to the lack of judicial discretion allowed under the “mandatory minimum sentence” part of the law. So the Hammond father and son went back to prison where they are now. (Read more from “94 Years in Prison for Reporting Federal Abuse? More Fall out From Standoff in Burns, Oregon” HERE) http://joemiller.us/2017/03/94-years-prison-reporting-federal-abuse-fall-standoff-burns-oregon/