Are you trying to say ID looks like a toilet? And the southern half is the bowl where the idiots/shit are located and North ID (the tank) is where the smart’uns are? :eek:
The jury returned a perverse verdict. It’s not OJ but it’s that ball park.
Two things; it validates what they think and stand for, and also it’s a hell of a contrast with the pipe line protest where the police are para-paramilitaries and the protesters largely unarmed and peaceful. Of course those protestors are mainly not good ole white guys.
There are smart and decent and good people in southern Idaho, but their ratio relative to the morons and wackadoodles is much, much lower than in the northern part of the state. US 95, the only road connecting the bowl to the tank is just two lanes wide: do you not think that might be by design?
So I can burn down City Hall and it’s legal???
COOL!!! 
Are you a Caucasian Christian without an excess of tats and a face that is tolerable to look at? These are the primary requirements, if you do not meet them, proceed with extreme caution or fiendish cleverness.
Bagley from the Salt Lake Tribune has an opinion on it
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Sorry you have to click through a ‘continue to article’ link to get to the cartoon.
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The weapons charges were tied to the conspiracy charge, i.e., they were charged with carrying a weapon in the commission of a crime. The weapon charge could only be considered if they were guilty of conspiracy.
On the theft charges… Ryan Bundy was charged with stealing a government surveillance camera. That charge was not decided because the jury was deadlocked on it. That may be because the cameras were recovered from the refuge.
Ken Medenbach was arrested at a grocery store in a government truck and was charged with stealing the truck. Reading the law, there is no way he could possibly be found innocent of that, yet he was. One theory is that the jury decided to give him a pass because if they weren’t going to convict the leaders of conspiracy and gun charges, why bother convicting a man in his 60s of a lesser charge? That’s not how the system is supposed to work, but it’s sort of understandable.
There were 15 informants who passed through the refuge at some point. There were originally 27 people charged in total but some have pled guilty and some are going to trial later. There were only 7 defendants at this trial. I don’t know if that had any effect on the jury or not.
2 jurors have spoken here and here. Juror 4 seems to have spearheaded the not guilty decision and juror 11 was a holdout until juror 4 got him kicked off the jury, possibly by lying. Hopefully more information will come out about the jury but it’s unlikely anything will change the verdict.
OK! I also have a gun (just a .22) and a Stetson hat. I’m good to go! 
Ehhh. So the jury did not consider it a conspiracy. They just all happened to show up at a refuge a thousand miles from their homes. And therefor all the gun charges had to be dropped. Oye.
Have you ever seen pictures of Ryan Bundy?
As I understand it, the conspiracy charges were tied to impeding Federal employees from doing their jobs, meaning the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt for all 12 jurors had to be that, not only did the defendants conspire to take over the refuge, but* they had to have intentionally planned to impede those employees from doing their jobs*. The prosecutors could have argued that by operation of law, taking over the refuge automatically meant they intended to impede the Federal employees from doing their jobs. But based on comments made by Juror #4, the prosecutors sort of took it for granted that the jury would accept this bootstrap. They didn’t.
It might seem nitpicky, but to this jury, making that direct connection to the conspiracy charge was important. To them, in the absence of clear, direct proof that such planned impediment took place, they could not render a guilty verdict on the conspiracy charges. All else flowed from those charges, so a not guilty verdict applied to other significant charges, also – with the exception noted by Fubaya of the surveillance camera theft. Frankly, that one sounds like a, “Screw it, we’ve gotta get out of here!” verdict.
To me, this mostly appears to be a case of “not proved” more than “not guilty.” Too bad, because it would have been easy for prosecutors to make this argument – and the result was a shitty verdict.
Thanks for that explanation. What a boneheaded move by the prosecution.
I would agree that their intent wasn’t to “intentionally planned to impede those employees from doing their jobs”. I doubt that many didn’t even really know what their intent was. Or they all had different ones. Shit, they couldn’t even plan to bring enough food. It’s VERY bad that those clowns got off so light. It will embolden others to act just as irrationally.
I suspect making it all a part of “conspiracy to interfere with federal workers” carries a more severe sentence than the more simple elements of the things that were actually done, even for those individual elements. Because that might have been the thinking of someone in the US Attorney’s office: sure it’s a slam dunk straight shot for mere destruction of property and interference with government activities, but we want something that will hurt them badly and make their supporters go home heads bowed. Federal Prosecutors love to intimidate defendants by piling up all the heaviest charges that may be conceivably made against you, to extract a plea. Sometimes what happens is this, that a bunch of low level mooks fold over trifles but those willing to make a stand actually come off better than expected. Or maybe just there are some people in the office that are enamored of trying complicated conspiracies.
The charges should have been allowed to each stand on their own and not be presented as necessarily flowing the one from the other.
And a prosecutor should never be seen by the jury as having an attitude of “why are you even here, this is so obvious”. That pisses off jurors.
Couldn’t they also have included the lesser charges? Why wouldn’t you do that?
I’m just here to add a bit of snark, feel free to ignore me …
If the Federal Courts used the legal boundaries of Oregon, they may have well brought in some out-of-staters … as long as the Feds refuse to acknowledge them, any resident of the State of Jefferson would vote to acquit, “The hell with you, Feds, give us our two Senate seats first.”
The defense was elegant … no Federal employee tried to come to work … there’s not one shred of evidence the occupiers impeded anyone … oh, they were carrying guns; I’ve said this before and got yelled at, but open carry in Oregon is not so rare as to be noteworthy; someone walking down a busy city sidewalk with a piece on his hip isn’t going to attract much notice.
Oh … I’ve sent in my application to the Democratic People’s Republic of Forest Park (Portland, OR) … they’ll need someone there to cook the books …
For the record … all my friends in Portland are as dumbfounded about this as all you are … please, these are just regular folk who live there that just happen to brew better beer than you.
Updating this thread Trump has pardoned Dwight and Steven Hammond:
And so Donald J. Trump, the President of the United States of America, becomes a sponsor of terrorism.
Come on…you know it’s not terrorism if they’re white and Christian!
This is Trump’s middle finger to federal law enforcement and the department of justice. But in extending this finger, he has now openly encouraged white extremists to challenge the federal criminal justice system.