Jury finds all Oregon standoff defendants not guilty of federal conspiracy, gun charges

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

There are two legal questions here. One is whether Oregon has any criminal jurisdiction over conduct on federal property. Do we know for sure that they don’t? I would have thought that since there are a whole lot of crimes for which there is no federal analogue that the state must retain jurisdiction. For example, AFAIK, there is no federal rape crime. Does this mean that if you rape someone on federal property that you’re free?

Second, there’s the question of whether Oregon or Nevada would have jurisdiction because parts of the crime were committed there. In particular, they no doubt formed their conspiracy before arriving on federal property, and probably took some preparatory steps off federal property as well.

ETA: apparently there is a solution to the first problem called the Assimilative Crimes Act.

22

They were acquitted of most charges (only one defendant with one only charge hung) – that means that the jury was unanimous in voting not guilty. And this was a federal jury, which means the members were drawn from metro as well as local areas.

Can you explain how, under those circumstances, you feel the jury was nullifying? It’s possible, I grant, but typically with nullification I expect to see a hung jury, not a unanimous acquittal.

23

See United States v. Sharpnack and the Assimilative Crimes Act.

24

Bricker, what’re your opinions on the trial in general?

25

I heard it was Some Puerto Rican Guy. He’s the real Keyser Soze!

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26

Enforcing the law is overrated. Thr jury is just following the government’s example.

27

I’m not a legal expert, Bricker, so in my “no-so-expert” opinion, I can’t see how else it could’ve happened.

28

To paraphrase a famous quote: It’s better that seven guilty persons go free than another Waco style bloodbath.

I wasn’t in the courtroom and even if I was I still wouldn’t know “Why” this happened. I do see a number of things that shouldn’t have added up to an acquittal but somehow did.

The standoff ended after 42(?) days with the death of only a single person and it can be well argued he brought that on himself. After seeing the ragtag army both inside the refuge and in the town of Burns this was a very favorable outcome. Not perfect but better than nearly every other alternative. In retrospect the FBI may have erred too far to the side of non confrontation.

The occupiers had free access to and from the refuge, going into town for supplies and rallies and some of them even went home on occasion only to freely return to the standoff. There are reasons for this, armed sympathizers staying in Burns making sure any attempt to contain the refuge would have been something like a “two front war” and any fighting in the town could have spiraled past any definition of acceptable risk in a big darn hurry.

But by holding so far back and going so far to avoid confrontation the FBI was left in a situation where the only people who fired a shot were them and the Oregon State Police. They deserve to be commended for the job they did but by doing it so well they made the prosecutor’s job harder.

The conspiracy to impede charge, hindsight being what it is, was a mistake. I’m not an attorney, I don’t know exactly what the charges should have been but it left the defense with an obvious argument, we never set out to deliberately prevent federal workers from doing their job, we were acting on a higher principle. This also let the defendants and the witnesses they called natter on for days (and days, and days) about “adverse possession,” government overreach and other things which are irrelevant to the charges they faced but which they passionately and sincerely believe.

And Marcus Mumford, co counsel for Ammon Bundy is crazy like a fox but still crazy. He deliberately pissed off the Judge pretty much throughout the trial and got it to work for him. He would intentionally ask questions he knew would draw objections and he’d do it over and over again. I guess it’s easier to paint your client as the victim of a vindictive government when the Judge is being forced to reprimand their attorney on a frequent basis.

But give him credit, he made it work. Of course he carried his theatrics a little too far at the end, after the verdict was read he managed to get himself tased. The irony of it all, Mumford might be the only one coming out of this affair with a conviction on his record.

Ammon Bundy’s Attorney Won the Biggest Case of His Life. Then He Was Tased in the Courtroom.

29

What isn’t being talked about as the national media milks as much outrage as it can about this verdict is the 15, yes fifteen FBI informants that were inside the protest at one time or another.

One of the informants helped train protesters in hand-to-hand combat and military style maneuvers. Another ‘mystery person’ brought in 22 long guns and 12 handguns where there were only handguns until that point. These were the guns that the FBI showed the jurors and refused to identify the supplying person. They didn’t go into the refuge heavily armed but some unidentified person made sure they were. The FBI must know who that was.

But wait, you say, they were heavily armed and even had a shooting range set up to practice their inevitable confrontation. And who ran the shooting range, why another FBI paid informant.

He was the last defense witness to testify before they rested their case.

I can imagine the jurors looking at each other and saying WTF!! This clear cut case has so much FBI mud thrown into the water that they just refused to convict, even though some of the charges were clearly guilty.

Read this whole article and image yourself as juror. And you know that is only a small part of what the jury heard.

I am not a Bundy supporter and think that they are ignorant yahoos, but I can also see why there was not a conviction. Something is rotten in Denmark, or rather Switzerland where the ‘shooting range’ informant was trained in psy-ops, weaponry and martial arts. I have a pretty good idea what this type of person is. And the jurors do too.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled outrage.

30

Juror 4 (the one who complained about the other juror) sent an email to the Oregonian explaining some of the verdict.

Some of the interesting quotes from here:

Some of this and other things he wrote do give me the impression that the jurors wanted to stick it to the government a little.

31

Well, there’s actual video of these people with guns on the reservation and videos of them up on telephone poles tampering with government property. One of them was spotted driving a government vehicle to the grocery store which certainly sounds like theft to me. So either the prosecution was amazingly incompetent or overconfident (not impossible), or the jury ignored some pretty hard evidence, at least of the lesser charges.

32

My late attorney friend was wont to say, “If a jury found them to be innocent, they didn’t do it.”

33

And a response from the juror who was dismissed. No love lost on that jury, evidently.

34

Does that violate any legal standard? Could a mistrial be declared based on that?

35

Just because a crime is committed doesn’t mean anyone is compelled to act.

36

Were the charges all of conspiracy? Perhaps the prosecutor didn’t prove that they all conspired to do these things.

37

So… two guys ‘conspire’ to rob a 7-11. Store clerk gets killed. Prosecutors charge them with conspiracy to kill clerk. Found innocent of that so all other charges dropped.

Looking for analogies.

38

I would think that they would be charged with robbery. They may not have conspired to kill the clerk, just planned to rob the store.

39

So the conspiracy charge should be dropped, but murder should still be upheld.

And so the Bundy’s should be found guilty of all the other shit they did. They didn’t conspire to prevent federal workers from doing their jobs, but they did illegally occupy federal property holding it with firearms (among a half-dozen or so other easily proven charges) .

40

Actually, if they’re on a jury, they sort of are.