{"id":6690,"date":"2011-08-03T05:56:54","date_gmt":"2011-08-03T09:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=6690"},"modified":"2011-08-03T05:56:54","modified_gmt":"2011-08-03T09:56:54","slug":"justice-is-not-found-here-1-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/justice-is-not-found-here-1-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"“Justice is Not Found Here” (1 of 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[Statement to the court by the climate criminal\u00a0Tim DeChristopher\u00a0before being sentenced to\u00a0two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine for ‘disrupting’ in 2008 a Bureau of Land Management auction of 116 parcels of public land in Utah for oil and gas leases.<\/em>\u00a0This defense of civil disobedience will surely ring down the years.IB]<\/p>\n


\n<\/em><\/div>\n
Frank Ross Federal Courthouse, Salt Lake City,\u00a026 July 2011<\/em><\/div>\n
\n

“Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the court.\u00a0 When I first met Mr. Manross, the sentencing officer who prepared the pre-sentence report, he explained that it was essentially his job to \u201cget to know me.\u201d\u00a0 He said he had to get to know who I really was and why I did what I did in order to decide what kind of sentence was appropriate.\u00a0 I was struck by the fact that he was the first person in this courthouse to call me by my first name, or even really look me in the eye.\u00a0 I appreciate this opportunity to speak openly to you for the first time.\u00a0 I\u2019m not here asking for your mercy, but I am here asking that you know me.<\/p>\n

Mr. Huber has leveled a lot of character attacks at me, many of which are contrary to Mr. Manross\u2019s report.\u00a0 While reading Mr Huber\u2019s critiques of my character and my integrity, as well as his assumptions about my motivations, I was reminded that Mr Huber and I have never had a conversation.\u00a0 \u00a0 Over the two and half years of this prosecution, he has never asked my any of the questions that he makes assumptions about in the government\u2019s report.\u00a0 Apparently, Mr. Huber has never considered it his job to get to know me, and yet he is quite willing to disregard the opinions of the one person who does see that as his job.<\/p>\n

There are alternating characterizations that Mr Huber would like you to believe about me.\u00a0 In one paragraph, the government claims I \u201cplayed out the parts of accuser, jury, and judge as he determined the fate of the oil and gas lease auction and its intended participants that day.\u201d \u00a0 In the very next paragraph, they claim \u201cIt was not the defendant\u2019s crimes that effected such a change.\u201d Mr Huber would lead you to believe that I\u2019m either a dangerous criminal who holds the oil and gas industry in the palm of my hand, or I\u2019m just an incompetent child who didn\u2019t affect the outcome of anything.\u00a0 As evidenced by the continued back and forth of contradictory arguments in the government\u2019s memorandum, they\u2019re not quite sure which of those extreme caricatures I am, but they are certain that I am nothing in between.\u00a0 Rather than the job of getting to know me, it seems Mr Huber prefers the job of fitting me into whatever extreme characterization is most politically expedient at the moment.<\/p>\n

In nearly every paragraph, the government\u2019s memorandum uses the words lie, lied, lying, liar.\u00a0 It makes me want to thank whatever clerk edited out the words \u201cpants on fire.\u201d\u00a0 Their report doesn\u2019t mention the fact that at the auction in question, the first person who asked me what I was doing there was Agent Dan Love.\u00a0 And I told him very clearly that I was there to stand in the way of an illegitimate auction that threatened my future.\u00a0 I proceeded to answer all of his questions openly and honestly, and have done so to this day when speaking about that auction in any forum, including this courtroom.\u00a0 The entire basis for the false statements charge that I was convicted of was the fact that I wrote my real name and address on a form that included the words \u201cbona fide bidder.\u201d\u00a0 When I sat there on the witness stand, Mr Romney asked me if I ever had any intention of being a bona fide bidder.\u00a0 I responded by asking Mr Romney to clarify what \u201cbona fide bidder\u201d meant in this context.\u00a0 Mr Romney then withdrew the question and moved on to the next subject.\u00a0 On that right there is the entire basis for the government\u2019s repeated attacks on my integrity.\u00a0 Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, your honor.<\/p>\n

Mr Huber also makes grand assumptions about my level of respect for the rule of law.\u00a0 The government claims a long prison sentence is necessary to counteract the political statements I\u2019ve made and promote a respect for the law.\u00a0 The only evidence provided for my lack of respect for the law is political statements that I\u2019ve made in public forums.\u00a0 Again, the government doesn\u2019t mention my actions in regard to the drastic restrictions that were put upon my defense in this courtroom.\u00a0 My political disagreements with the court about the proper role of a jury in the legal system are probably well known.\u00a0 I\u2019ve given several public speeches and interviews about how the jury system was established and how it has evolved to its current state.\u00a0 Outside of this\u00a0 courtroom, I\u2019ve made my views clear that I agree with the founding fathers that juries should be the conscience of the community and a defense against legislative tyranny.\u00a0 I even went so far as to organize a book study group that read about the history of jury nullification.\u00a0 Some of the participants in that book group later began passing out leaflets to the public about jury rights, as is their right.\u00a0 Mr Huber was apparently so outraged by this that he made the slanderous accusations that I tried to taint the jury.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t specify the extra number of months that I should spend in prison for the heinous activity of holding a book group at the Unitarian Church and quoting Thomas\u00a0 Jefferson in public, but he says you should have \u201clittle tolerance for this behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

But here is the important point that Mr Huber would rather ignore.\u00a0 Despite my strong disagreements with the court about the Constitutional basis for the limits on my defense, while I was in this courtroom I respected the authority of the court.\u00a0 Whether I agreed with them or not, I abided by the restrictions that you put on me and my legal team.\u00a0 I never attempted to \u201ctaint\u201d the jury, as Mr Huber claimed, by sharing any of the relevant facts about the auction in question that the court had decided were off limits.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t burst out and tell the jury that I successfully raised the down payment and offered it to the BLM.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t let the jury know that the auction was later reversed because it was illegitimate in the first place.\u00a0 To this day I still think I should have had the right to do so, but disagreement with the law should not be confused with disrespect for the law.<\/p>\n

My public statements about jury nullification were not the only political statements that Mr Huber thinks I should be punished for.\u00a0 As the government\u2019s memorandum points out, I have also made public statements about the value of civil disobedience in bringing the rule of law closer to our shared sense of justice.\u00a0 In fact, I have openly and\u00a0 explicitly called for nonviolent civil disobedience against mountaintop removal coal mining in my home state of West Virginia.\u00a0 Mountaintop removal is itself an illegal activity, which has always been in violation of the Clean Water Act, and it is an illegal activity that kills people.\u00a0 A West Virginia state investigation found that Massey Energy had been cited with 62,923 violations of the law in the ten years preceding the disaster that killed 29 people last year.\u00a0 The investigation also revealed that Massey paid for almost none of those violations because the company provided millions of dollars worth of campaign contributions that elected most of the appeals court judges in the state.\u00a0 When I was growing up in West Virginia, my mother was one of many who pursued every legal avenue for making the coal industry follow the law.\u00a0 She commented at hearings, wrote petitions and filed lawsuits, and many have continued to do ever since, to no avail.\u00a0 I actually have great respect for the rule of law, because I see what happens when it doesn\u2019t exist, as is the case with the fossil fuel industry.\u00a0 Those crimes committed by Massey Energy led not only to the deaths of their own workers, but to the deaths of countless local residents, such as Joshua McCormick, who died of kidney cancer at age 22 because he was unlucky enough to live downstream from a coal mine.\u00a0 When a corrupted government is no longer willing to uphold the rule of law, I advocate that citizens step up to that responsibility.<\/p>\n

This is really the heart of what this case is about.\u00a0 The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law.\u00a0 Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law.<\/p>\n

Mr Huber claims that the seriousness of my offense was that I \u201cobstructed lawful government proceedings.\u201d\u00a0 But the auction in question was not a lawful proceeding.\u00a0 I know you\u2019ve heard another case about some of the irregularities for which the auction was overturned.\u00a0 But that case did not involve the BLM\u2019s blatant violation of Secretarial Order 3226, which was a law that went into effect in 2001 and required the BLM to weigh the impacts on climate change for all its major decisions, particularly resource development.\u00a0 A federal judge in Montana ruled last year that the BLM was in constant violation of this law throughout the Bush administration.\u00a0 In all the proceedings and debates about this auction, no apologist for the government or the BLM has ever even tried to claim that the BLM followed this law.\u00a0 In both the December 2008 auction and the creation of the Resource Management Plan on which this auction was based, the BLM did not even attempt to follow this law.<\/p>\n

And this law is not a trivial regulation about crossing t\u2019s or dotting i\u2019s to make some government accountant\u2019s job easier.\u00a0 This law was put into effect to mitigate the impacts of catastrophic climate change and defend a livable future on this planet.\u00a0 This law was about protecting the survival of young generations.\u00a0 That\u2019s kind of a big deal.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very big deal to me.\u00a0 If the government is going to refuse to step up to that responsibility to defend a livable future, I believe that creates a moral imperative for me and other citizens.\u00a0 My future, and the future of everyone I care about, is being traded for short term profits.\u00a0 I take that very personally.\u00a0 Until our leaders take seriously their responsibility to pass on a healthy and just world to the next generation, I will continue this fight.<\/p>\n

The government has made the claim that there were legal alternatives to standing in the way of this auction.\u00a0 Particularly, I could have filed a written protest against certain parcels.\u00a0 The government does not mention, however, that two months prior to this auction, in October 2008, a Congressional report was released that looked into those protests.\u00a0 The report, by the House committee on public lands, stated that it had become common practice for the BLM to take volunteers from the oil and gas industry to process those permits.\u00a0 The oil industry was paying people specifically to volunteer for the industry that was supposed to be regulating it, and it was to those industry staff that I would have been appealing.\u00a0 Moreover, this auction was just three months after the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reported on a major scandal involving Department of the Interior regulators who were taking bribes of sex and drugs from the oil companies that they were supposed to be regulating.\u00a0 In 2008, this was the condition of the rule of law, for which Mr Huber says I lacked respect.\u00a0 Just as the legal avenues which people in West Virginia have been pursuing for 30 years, the legal avenues in this case were constructed precisely to protect the corporations who control the government.<\/p>\n

The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it\u2019s that I have greater respect for justice.\u00a0 Where there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code.\u00a0 I know Mr Huber disagrees with me on this.\u00a0 He wrote that \u201cThe rule of law is the bedrock of our civilized society, not acts of \u2018civil disobedience\u2019 committed in the name of the cause of the day.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s an especially ironic statement when he is representing the United States of America, a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience.\u00a0 Since those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice.\u00a0 The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together.<\/p>\n

This philosophical difference is serious enough that Mr Huber thinks I should be imprisoned to discourage the spread of this idea.\u00a0 Much of the government\u2019s memorandum focuses on the political statements that I\u2019ve made in public.\u00a0 But it hasn\u2019t always been this way.\u00a0 When Mr Huber was arguing that my defense should be limited, he addressed my views this way: \u201cThe public square is the proper stage for the defendant\u2019s message, not criminal proceedings in federal court.\u201d\u00a0 But now that the jury is gone, Mr. Huber wants to take my message from the public square and make it a central part of these federal court proceedings.\u00a0 I have no problem with that.\u00a0 I\u2019m just as willing to have those views on display as I\u2019ve ever been. (…)<\/p>\n

(to be continued)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Statement to the court by the climate criminal\u00a0Tim DeChristopher\u00a0before being sentenced to\u00a0two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine for ‘disrupting’ in 2008 a Bureau of Land Management auction of 116 parcels of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,27,31,1],"tags":[1035],"class_list":["post-6690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agitprop","category-capitalism","category-climate-change","category-uncategorized","tag-tim-dechristopher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6690"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6699,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6690\/revisions\/6699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}