Thursday, August 7, 2008
Deserve's Got Nothing to Do With It
Via The Smallest Minority, another tale of Federal overreach:
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Lynn Moses will be locked up in federal prison next Wednesday.
His crime?
Protecting the city of Driggs, Idaho from flooding...
At this point, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), emboldened by newly granted bureaucratic authority, jumped in and went right after Mr. Moses, indicting and prosecuting him for violating the Clean Water Act in the years 2002, 2003 and 2004 for doing nothing more than the routine maintenance on the channel he had been doing for 20 years, under requirements imposed by local government...
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Read the whole thing and pass it on, please.
Remember, folks - we taught our public servants that behavior such as this travesty is permissible.
We, the People, acquiesced in the building of our own cages.
Hope and Change, anyone?
Tempus fugit.
This is absurd! Where is a group like the ACLU when you actually need them!? And where is the community? If I was the attorney I would have stood up on my table and shouted the judge down till they threw me out of the courtroom!
ReplyDeleteThe scary thing is that eventually people are going to have enough. And when that point comes it's not going to be orderly or a revolution from the ballot box, it's going to rain blood.
I hope to god it doesn't come to that, but every day people get pushed a little more and a little more.
What really happened? The guy broke the law over and over after being told to stop:
ReplyDeleteAs early as 1982 and several times after, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials told Moses that his work altering Teton Creek required a permit under the Clean Water Act, according to the ruling. Still, Moses worked to reroute and reshape the creek for more than 20 years, the ruling says, dumping gravel, dirt and logs into the creek and deepening the channel.
"While his sangfroid (or even contempt) in the face of agency demands may show either courage or foolhardiness, it does not save him from the consequences of his actions," Judge Ferdinand Fernandez wrote in the ruling.
In 1995, the Corps of Engineers ordered Moses to stop all dredge and fill operations in the creek, and follow-up letters were sent to the developer in 1996 and 1997, according to the ruling.
Moses failed to apply for the permits in 2002, 2003 and 2004, and violated a 2004 EPA cease-and-desist order by dumping dredged material into the creek, court records show.
In 2005 a federal grand jury indicted Moses on three counts of felonious violations of the Clean Water Act, and Moses was found guilty several months later.
Winmill handed down the sentence plus a $9,000 fine, but agreed to postpone it while Moses appealed.
Let's assume that everything you say is accurate.
ReplyDeleteDo the facts truly support multiple felony convictions?
Really?
A good reminder on the overall topic is here.