TheAgitator.com
You’re Probably a Criminal, Too
Saturday, July 25th, 2009Last week, Reps. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) held much-needed hearings last on the ever expanding reach and scope of federal law which, given a creative prosecutor and compliant judge, can make a federal criminal out of just about anyone.
One witness who testified at the hearings is convicted federal felon Krister Evertson. The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Walsh has a write-up. What happened to Evertson is so outrageous, it merits a lengthy excerpt:
Krister never had so much as a traffic ticket before he was run off the road near his mother’s home in Wasilla, Alaska, by SWAT-armored federal agents in large black SUVs training automatic weapons on him.
Evertson, who had been working on clean-energy fuel cells since he was in high school, had no idea what he’d done wrong. It turned out that when he legally sold some sodium (part of his fuel-cell materials) to raise cash, he forgot to put a federally mandated safety sticker on the UPS package he sent to the lawful purchaser.
Krister’s lack of a criminal record did nothing to prevent federal agents from ransacking his mother’s home in their search for evidence on this oh-so-dangerous criminal.
The good news is that a federal jury in Alaska acquitted Krister of all charges. The jurors saw through the charges and realized that Krister had done nothing wrong.
The bad news, however, is that the feds apparently had it in for Krister. Federal criminal law is so broad that it gave prosecutors a convenient vehicle to use to get their man.
Two years after arresting him, the feds brought an entirely new criminal prosecution against Krister on entirely new grounds. They used the fact that before Krister moved back to Wasilla to care for his 80-year-old mother, he had safely and securely stored all of his fuel-cell materials in Salmon, Idaho.
According to the government, when Krister was in jail in Alaska due to the first unjust charges, he had “abandoned” his fuel-cell materials in Idaho. Unfortunately for Krister, federal lawmakers had included in the Resource Recovery and Conservation Act a provision making it a crime to abandon “hazardous waste.” According to the trial judge, the law didn’t require prosecutors to prove that Krister had intended to abandon the materials (he hadn’t) or that they were waste at all — in reality, they were quite valuable and properly stored away for future use.
With such a broad law, the second jury didn’t have much of a choice, and it convicted him. He spent almost two years locked up with real criminals in a federal prison. After he testifies today, he will have to return to his halfway house in Idaho and serve another week before he is released.
So he was convicted of “abandoning” the hazardous materials in Idaho because he was in an Alaska jail awaiting trial on the bogus safety sticker charge for which he was acquitted. But he wasn’t allowed to use that in his defense. Nor were prosecutors required to prove that the materials he didn’t really abandon were actually waste. Note too the ridiculously paramilitary confrontation and arrest for the non-crime of failing to affix a safety sticker to a UPS package.
Back in 2004, Gene Healy wrote a piece for Reason on the ever-growing federal criminal code.
How could the trial judge rule that the DOJ didn’t need to prove that the material was waste? And why are fderal judges blocking juries from hearing the basic facts of the case? Jurors should strike federal courts till that’s stopped.
Most of us are fully aware that the government doesn’t do anything as a benefit to ordinary citizens, so, while we’re outraged, we’re really rarely surprised by stories like this.
The real surprise is that the overwhelming majority of people out there can be so naive as to believe, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, that government is benevolent and actually serves “the people”.
From the government perspective, citizens serve only a single political purpose and that is to legitimize the existence of the government by voting. They know they can spit in the faces of the voters (which they do repeatedly) and they will still be re-elected every time. When a woman is repeatedly beaten by her husband, we wonder why she doesn’t leave him, but we never ask ourselves why we keep re-electing the same fucking assholes who abuse us.
Johnl:
if the statute defines hazardous waste so broadly that there is no requirement to demonstrate the “waste” element, then the prosecutors do not need to demonstrate it. It makes as much sense as charging him for “abandoning” it because they had locked him up, or sending in the SWAT team for forgetting a little sticker.
It shows how the “common law” principles of justice and common sense can be written away by overbroad but comprehensive laws.
It also provides another datapoint for Radley’s debate with liberals who don’t mind more laws, as long as the “right people” are in power, forgetting the problem of unintended consequences.
Dave: as the Daily Show said about the problem with the California budget, the problem is the people who keep electing a-holes and expecting them to pass laws, but can’t be bothered think about the issues. I mean, how many people read the news/opinion blogs as against gossip, cat tricks and porn?
He may not have had to rule on it. It may just be part of the law.
Some child porn laws used to have a clause that made it unnecessary for the prosecution to prove the age of the child used in the porn. To me, that was unbelievable, but believability is apparently not a requirement laws.
This is crap. Whatever happened to the concept of mens rea? It sickens me that someone can be criminally prosecuted for a “crime” for which no criminal intent was ever proven and which didn’t harm anyone.
The prosecutor in these cases is pure slime. Why go after this guy on these trumped up charges? Either he did something that was really wrong and illegal and they charge him with that or they leave him the hell alone. The fact that the prosecution carried a vendetta for several years is further indication that it is out of control. And, why use stormtroopers to arrest someone for a paperwork violation? It doesn’t matter how tiny his penis is, there is no justification for such outrageous force.
And, I certainly agree that the circumstances of the second charge should have been made known to the jury. I fear this is another aspect of this case affected by the lack of a criminal intent requirement in the law. Since the law doesn’t require the prosecution to show criminal intent, I wonder if the defense is barred from presenting evidence whose purpose is to establish that he had none?
Healy is definitely correct that the Constitution grants the federal government almost no power to enact criminal laws (outside of counterfeiting, treason, etc.). Even if strict adherence to the Constitution is something routinely ignored by Congress (which has no legitimate authority outside that granted by the Constitution anyway), the fact that Congress passes (and the President signs) criminal statutes without any requirement that the prosecution show criminal intent is evidence enough that Congress is not competent to up to the task of writing criminal law.
Last month, one of the commenters at Reason posted this link to an illustrated version of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
Having never read the book, I found the last panel disturbing [Spoiler Alert, I guess]: “What used to be an error has now a become crime against the state.”
But hey, we’re all gonna get free health care! Woo hoo!
Mens rea is a concept from the common law, and they can write it out of the law. For example, possession of child porn, IIRC, does not require intent to possess, proof of the age of child, or reasonable belief of the age of the person. Remember, there are people getting in trouble for pictures of their kids in the bath, or for pornographic cartoons.
Someone could use a virus to upload kiddie porn on your computer and then call the FBI, and have you arrested and marked for life.
With sufficient laws on the books, everybody is guilty of something.
Whether this was intentional or not on the part of those who wrote the laws, it is inevitable that people in power will use that fact to attack those who oppose them.
BTW, I am glad Representatives Scott and Gohmert are holding hearings on this, but I fully expect that it will make almost no difference. They may manage to clean up a handful of laws that have been egregiously abused. And, even those little fixes would be lucky to pass after the federal agencies who enforce those laws slither up to the podium and whine about how they need those broad laws to keep us safe. And about how they will be “hamstrung” by more narrowly tailored ones. And about how they use good judgment and discretion 99.9999783% of the time. And, of course, about how these are rare, unfortunate exceptions and the public should trust them not to be vindictive assholes when they decide the next citizen is out of line and needs some federal prison time to “get his mind right”.
But, any real changes are hopelessly unlikely. The reality is that Congress isn’t going to limit its ability to write bad laws in any significant way. When you boil it down to basics, this is about power and they aren’t going to give any up.
The best we can hope for is that the hearings get some attention and the general public comes away a little more aware of how laws put ordinary people just like them in real jeopardy even when the laws are well-intended.
The biggest difference between federal criminal law and state criminal law is that federal criminal law is not subject to the competitive pressure that limits state law.
I don’t know about all of you, but *I* definitely feel safer…
#8 | SJE | July 25th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
“Mens rea is a concept from the common law, and they can write it out of the law. For example, possession of child porn, IIRC, does not require intent to possess, proof of the age of child, or reasonable belief of the age of the person. Remember, there are people getting in trouble for pictures of their kids in the bath, or for pornographic cartoons.
Someone could use a virus to upload kiddie porn on your computer and then call the FBI, and have you arrested and marked for life.”
That’s actually not true. While “mens rea” refers to intent, that pertains to the intent to commit the act, not necessarily the intent to commit an illegal act. When people are wrongly prosecuted for possessing child porn due to having a picture of their kid in the bathtub, “mens rea” would refer to the intent to possess the picture. The Supreme Court has made it clear that one cannot be charged with a crime without some form of intent. It cannot be written out of the law.
Except, of course, where it can, such as being forced to pay taxes, or certain laws that are permitted to violate equal protection. It does get complicated, but your summary was inaccurate.
The accused not “being allowed” to speak in his/her own defense is absolutely maddening. As if the posecution lying, the withholding evidence, and the judge lying to juries isn’t enough.
JohnJ, thanks for the clarification. But, isn’t that what’s in play here, the intent to commit the act? Krister (the guy who got railroaded) never intended to “abandon” his supplies. He was forced to leave them by law to appear at his trial.
And, of course, this gets a little messy because of the whole issue where he (reasonably) didn’t know that his non-waste supplies could be considered “waste” because of the sloppily written law and the colon-dwelling prosecutor.
…
There are two more troubling aspects of his not being able to inform the jury of the circumstances of his “abandonment”. First, even though the state may not have had to prove intent, why couldn’t he still introduce the information about his whereabouts as part of the defense? I mean, if I’m accused of murder, the state may not be required to show that I’m green-eyed, but I can still mention it if I think it helps my case, can’t I?
Second, even assuming there is some legitimate legal reason not to allow that information in the actual trial, why would have been excluded from sentencing? Certainly, it should be relevant there. And, surely the judge knew about that information. Did the judge just ignore it (in which case he’s as big an asshole as the prosecution), or is there some mandatory minimum sentencing rule as part of the law?
So what if the sticker was just peeled off in transit?
**I’m a criminal, you’re a criminal, he’s a criminal, she’s a criminal, wouldn’t you like to be a criminal too?…**
If you make enough laws you basically criminalize normal behavior. That’s why I don’t hold it against anyone who is labelled a criminal nowdays, who knows if they really are or not?
who could blame this guy if he put his fuel cell expertise to work building a few well-placed bombs? geez, these assholes derailed this family’s lives.
I’m sure an added bonus is that this guy won’t be able to get a job anywhere near a fuel cell or any other energy tech field. Boy, do I feel safe knowing the feds are twisting to law to protect me from absent minded research scientists!
OK, Mr prosecutor, go ahead and pull this shit a few more times. Sooner or later, someone is going to get out of jail and use a bit of applied physics and chemistry on you.
#9 et al
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one “makes” them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on the guilt.”
– Ayn Rand, _Atlas Shrugged_
#15 | freedomfan
That’s what trials are supposed to be for. Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that some laws are simply ridiculous.
#22 | Frank
It’s important to remember that Rand was speaking about the government’s moral authority. When the government steps outside its moral authority, it still has power, but that power has no more moral weight than that of a street thug who can force someone to hand over their wallet at the point of a gun.
I have an amateur chemistry/biology lab in my house, and a cnc machine shop in the garage. I figure it’s only a matter of time before I buy the “wrong” chemical, Erlenmeyer flask or metallic alloy and get my front door kicked it.
I’d also add that cities and states have their own over-the-top laws criminalizing normal chemicals, materials and tools, usually in the name of the war on drugs/terror/whatever, so I wouldn’t limit the outrage to just the Feds.
Wow, this guy has lot of self control. Other people would have gone on a rampage a long time ago.
The fact that he actually went to tesify shows he did not learn his lesson. The government is not here to help you. It’s here to tax you and make your life miserable.
I hate to go against the unanimous grain of the preceding 25 comments, but I must point out that sodium metal is *extremely* dangerous, and shipping it by air in unmarked containers can result in the utter destruction of the aircraft, its crew, and anything nearby. Sodium metal cannot be stored in air, it must be stored in nitrogen or argon gas only. In air it forms caustic sodium hydroxide and/or catches fire spontaneously. If exposed to standing water, sodium metal will violently explode. Shipping unmarked sodium could reasonably have been interpreted as an act of sabotage.
He was storing the metal and byproducts in open air in the Idaho location, which is not an appropriate way to handle such materials. He endangered that community and every community through which he trucked this very hazardous material.
The write up from Heritage is (surprise, surprise) pretty misleading so I encourage you to go to primary sources like epa.gov and the local newspaper where he was tried
I once read an excellent article comparing law codes of the middle ages. The two prevailing codes were Germanic and Roman. Germanic law codes, at the core, defined a crime as a transgression upon the rights of an individual. Roman codes defined a crime as a transgression upon the sovereignty of the government. Can you guess which one is the prevailing thought today?
And I really need to find that article again…I suppose I’ll have to dig around the stacks at a nearby university or something…
Remember: They Hate Us Because We’re Free.
Speaking of primary sources, this federal court ruling states that Evertson shipped unlabeled sodium metal on 37 separate occasions, in addition to giving a false address when applying for a box at the US Post Office. Basically this guy was in the business of illegally shipping hazardous materials. Doesn’t seem like victim/hero/martyr material to me.
http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D09AKXC/05-06883.PDF
Gotta second JWB on this. Shipping HAZMAT unlabeled is playing russian roulette with other peoples lives.
I actually receive HAZMAT in real life. It is a massive PITA. And expensive. And necessary.
Shipping sodium unlabeled?
“Hey Vern, that package is smoking!
No problem, Darryl, I’ll just quench it with this bucket of water.”
Boom!
That said, the feds played it like jack-booted thugs.
A pox on both their houses.
#25 Jeffrey Barker,
Sodium metal is hazardous but nowhere near as hazardous as you claim. Some domestic drain cleaners have had peices of sodium in them.
It will form sodium hydroxide if placed in water and the reaction is violent In air it will form surface oxide films and eventually corrode. It will burn if ignited. It can be safely stored under kerosine etc. It does not have to be under an inert gas so long as it is kept away from water and fire.
The issue that you are ignoring is that the waste abandonment charges were BS because he was in jail at the time of the supposed abandonment. They forced him to leave the material unattended. They prosecuted him for their actions.
Jeff Baker:
He was aquitted on the sodium charge. He has been criminally convicted of “abandoning” chemicals that were properly stored, “abandoning” them being defined as “he wasn’t there with them because he was in jail and the jury wasn’t allowed to know why”.
That’s the problem.
This is like the medical marijuana cases where the defendant and his counsel are basically gagged throughout the trial. It’s a complete sham kangaroo court. Further the jurors are prevented from even knowing that the defense is gagged to give it an “appearance” of being fair. Any judge who does this should be impeached immediately.
The Feds continue to expand their authority: a recent armed robbery case in Albuquerque in which two scumbags robbed a Denny’s and, in the process, shot and killed a cook who worked there has been in the news. The two robbers will be charged in Federal Court simply because Denny’s is an interstate chain of restaurants! There are so many nationally-franchised commercial establishments in the U.S. now that the authorizing law (I’m not sure which it is) could be use to insert the Feds into virtually any crime!
This is simply wrong, and is an obvious and rather large expansion of Federal authority.
I’m left wondering what the motive was for this prosecution? I think there has to be something behind this. There has to be payoffs or backdoor deals going on. But with whom? Who benefitted from the prosecution of this man? What was gained by shutting him down? There’s something much more dirty & scary going on here than what’s on the surface.
“With such a broad law, the second jury didn’t have much of a choice, and it convicted him.”
Well, I guess they’re fucking automatons then.
They most certainly had a choice.
Jury nullification.
In EVERY case.
Look, it’s obvious that the majority of the readers here have not read the primary documents in this case, and are relying entirely on the overheated writeups from Heritage. Evertson was convicted for improperly *transporting* 10 tons of sodium metal from Seattle to Idaho. That had nothing to do with him being in jail.
I still say people need to inform themselves by going to the primary sources. Heritage and Reason are not research material.
“…he began storing the leftover sodium metal, sludge and a corrosive liquid at the Steel and Ranch Supply storage facility in Salmon.”
Again, this guy had 22,000 pounds of sodium in a U-Store-It and didn’t tell anyone. What do you think would have happened if the fire department had responded to that facility with water? If you guessed “25 tons of concentrated sodium hydroxide”, you’re right!
There’s a reason the EPA considers Evertson to be one of the major prosecutions of 2007: what he was doing was genuinely dangerous.
Again, the truth of the matter is radically different from the Heritage writeup. Heritage says that jury was not required to find that the material was waste, but the appeals court found:
“The instruction required the jury to find that Evertson knowingly stored materials that he knew to be (1) hazardous and (2) waste.”
So there you go.
I agree with Jeff on most of his statements, but want to make sure I note that the SWAT team running him off the road thing was ridiculous and the abandonment charge was ridiculous, and that the fact that they happened at all is a sign of the govt/police culture most, if not all, of us here are against.
Moving on from that…I have a tiny bit of research experience with Alkali metals and although what Lloyd is intimating (I’ll summarize what I think you mean as “it’s relatively easy to store very safely 99% of the time”) is very true, when there IS a problem, which DOES happen, there tends to be amazing consequences. I’ve had to patch up third story floor that a small block almost burned through before the grad student involved could get it chucked out the window where the hazmat team took care of it on the grounds below. I’ve had to process the pictures of another grad student with half his face melted who only had the other half because of good safety equipment. My mother once buried a block of sodium under twenty pounds of salt in a shallow grave in the Kentucky hills because no one could figure out how to put it out after it destroyed most of her lab and smoldered under the pile of crystals. Also keep in mind that any research involving sodium almost certainly involves sodium alloys that can be hundreds of times more reactive than the metal itself…that shit is amazingly dangerous and research is what this fellow was supposed to be interested in. It’s bullshit he got assaulted by cops, bullshit he got convicted of a storage rule he could do nothign about, and totally possible that there really is enough more to this story that he needed to be reigned in by regulators (no, not SWAT but yes, the govt).
By the way “possibly more to this story” certainly doesn’t mean there is, and it sounds very much like he had taken great care dealing with what he was working on and was caught up in a mess of people who don’t know science from a hole in the ground and think reactive materials = “happy days! we get to prosecute a terrorist!”
I just want to restate that, if this guy did something illegal, then prosecute him for it and be done with it. Don’t lose that prosecution (which is what happened) and then decide to go after him later for something he failed to do because he was busy defending the first charge.
And, it’s worth repeating a point I often make here about the bipolar fallacy: The fact that people think the government is misbehaving does not mean we think the person they are going after is a hero. And, it is not relevant whether or not he is. Even if their target was acting irresponsibly in some regard, bringing abandonment of waste charges against him while he was required to be away to deal with other charges they had leveled against him is slimy.
In this case, the guy was initially charged with illegally shipping sodium. No matter what else the government says about the case, that charge failed to win them a conviction. Note also that the specific charge was not that he didn’t materially fail to safeguard the sodium, but that he failed to label it properly for shipment.
Further, although the government may claim his sodium was improperly stored, his version is that he stored the sodium at an industrial storage facility and “he carefully stored all of his materials, machines, and byproduct in stainless steel tanks, with much of the sodium either surrounded by oil and plastic or in its original, legal packaging from China.”
Once again, it is possible that the government is correct that Evertson was not handling the material properly. But, some of the summaries make it sound like he certainly went through a lot of effort to safely store it and, whether his efforts complied with federal codes or not, it’s a stretch to assume that he went through that effort to “abandon” the sodium.
It also appears that the judge instructed the jury to assume the EPA’s claim was true that his materials were “waste”. Why not let him present testimony about that? It seems to me that there is a real problem when the government convicts someone of a crime by instructing the jury to assume that the government’s version of events is true.
In the end, this guy spends two years in jail for a “crime” where, no matter how the other details pan out, no one got hurt and no environmental damage was done. I’m not okay with that.
OT, but I had posted about this in another thread Friday and now I have more details…
My local paper is reporting that effective September 1, officers will be authorized to use force when issuing mandatory evacuation orders during hurricanes.
To put it in perspective: even though residents aren’t required by law to evacuate, police are authorized to use force to get citizens to comply.
As usual, the paper does an extremely crappy job of reporting the issue. It’s mostly reassurances from local LEOs telling the public that we have nothing to worry about. The online version of the article cuts off mid-sentence halfway through the story, but the hard copy version has zero info on who sponsored the law or how our local representatives voted on it.
When Hurricane Rita was out in the middle of the Gulf in September of 2005, our mayor issued an extremely premature mandatory evacuation order – Rita eventually hit land about 375 miles away.
So, to sum things up: Bad municipal administration is now enforceable by bad policing.
Freedomfan, you base your analysis on the writeup instead of primary documents. According to the court filing (which is available in PACER and wil cost you only 8c) Evertson was arrested in Alaska on May 27 2004 and the EPA began their activity at the Idaho site the very same day and conducted an emergency removal the next day, May 28 2004.
For those of you who keep claiming that this material was stored safely and effectively please view this photograph which I have just uploaded to my site:
http://octothorpe.barelyconnected.net/~jwb/idaho.jpg
If I may continue injecting facts into this debate, according to the EPA the materials were moved to this field in August 2002 and the man wasn’t arrested on the initial charge until May 2004. Claims that he would have used the material if only he had not been in jail strain belief.
Tsu, please post the reference prominently here when you find it!
By my accounts, the Road to Serfdom is what weez on. We got company, though. And, we got North Korea running point way up ahead.
The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Walsh is in error that “the second jury didn’t have much of a choice” in convicting. Jurors have the right and responsibility to judge both the facts of the case and the law(s) being applied. They can say no to bad law or misapplication of good law by refusing to convict.
I think the problem with jury nullification these days is that judges routinely instruct juries that they are only allowed to judge the facts of the case at hand, often relegating the jury to the function of a rubber stamp. Juries rarely know of their power over the law itself. In fact, if jury nullification actually started occurring with any regularity, I’m certain that supporters of that power would be aggressively eliminated during voir dire.
Yeah, I know I’m one depressing SOB.
Jeffrey, no one is claiming that he was actively using the materials when he was arrested or when he had to face the first set of charges. In fact, the article states that he had to take time off from his fuel cell research because he ran out of operating capital. Presumably, that’s partly why the sodium was in storage. His claim isn’t that he was using it during that time, only that he intended to go back and continue his research with it after he had accumulated the funds to do so.
It’s possible that those EPA pictures are actually of Evertson’s stored sodium and not of something else. But, it’s a little odd that he would maintain the claim that he had the sodium stored in stainless steel drums if it was in ordinary steel drums and there were pictures and documentation proving it.
Nevertheless, I will repeat, the issue for me is not whether he was storing his sodium safely. I don’t think it is in dispute that he was charged first with improperly labeling his sodium for shipment and then much later with abandoning the sodium. If I am incorrect in that last sentence, feel free to correct me. In my view, if they were going to charge him with abandoning a hazardous material, they should have done it when they discovered the materials and removed them, which happened at almost the same time. Why arrest him and charge him on the first charge and then wait so long to charge him with an obviously related issue when they knew about the second issue at almost the same time the first charge was filed? How many trials should he be put through for charges related to his mishandling of the sodium that the government knew about when the first charges were filed? If he had been acquitted of the second charges as he had the first, should they have then charges him with some third related violation and dragged him into court again? If laws were broken, then charge him and be done with it.
And, I repeat that a judge instructing the jury to accept the EPA’s account of events rather than allowing them to decide for themselves what they found to be credible is very troubling. If the police charge you with a crime and the judge instructs the jury to assume the police’s version of events is true even when you have a different version of those events, it seems the judge is hamstringing your defense in a very substantial way.
I apologize to Agitator readers for sounding like a broken record… then compounding the issue by engaging in a little blogwhoring, but the thumbs up I was getting on the hurricane messages indicates that others might be interested in the subject.
After some investigation, I found out that the law authorizing the use of force in the enforcement of evacuation orders was part of HB 4409, the Windstorm Insurance reform bill which passed unanimously in the House.
I just wrote a long email to my State Representative, Solomon Ortiz Jr, only to get it rejected for being past the 5,000 character limit. (It only tells you there’s a limit after the fact… fuckers).
Rather that whittle the letter down, I posted it online and then sent him a link to the letter. I added that it’s too bad that the Texas Legislature doesn’t have a similar feature which prevents our lawmakers from passing laws that restrict freedom.
If anyone’s interested, I’ve posted the letter at my never-updated blog.
Fellow Texans should keep this in mind: The bill passed unanimously. All our reps voted for the boot in the face. As I told Rep. Ortiz, it’s not a matter of if this law gets abused, it’s a matter of when.
My reply here has nothing to do with the legal merits of the case (just a warning I guess)…I’m just easily caught up in the practical aspects of the materials involved being a chemist and an engineer.
The only thing that really bothers me about that storage picture is its proximity to a road, which may just be a driveway. Each of those barrels appears to have a materials document attached to it and if the worst barrel is the one in the inset picture (usually how these things go) there’s really no big deal. The units haven’t lost their integrity and aren’t leaking. Some rot on the ribbing means essentially nothing though it’s not pretty, especially if these are lined barrels or if they have nonreactive (stainless) inserts. My main concern for safety was that the sodium was stored in a building where a runaway reaction would set other things on fire and injure occupants…this location seems at most to endanger someone driving by at the instant the reaction occurs. Beyond that, although sodium is very reactive, alloys even more so, and when it pops it tends to set the oil it’s stored in on fire, it’s not jet fuel. The “explosion” is from vaporizing oil that catches fire, nothing more, and doesn’t tend to have a serious burst radius. Looking at this pic I suspect that all of the concentrated sodium hydroxide the EPA was bitching about resulted from the EPA’s neutralization of the sodium with water and wasn’t just stored on site. Even if it was, and even if every barrel there leaked/caught on fire/blew up, the environmental damage would have been laughable. The pH of the field would have been high enough to prevent vegetation from growing for a few years and nearby streams would have a fish kill. Not super results, but not exactly something I’m real worried about. You’d almost have to try for someone to be injured in the incident, though it might look awful impressive.
So, in summary, he should have had a (larger?) secondary barrier to contain a leak, and should have moved it about twenty more feet away from the road. Send in the military boys, this guy is dangerous.
This story alone is ample reason, my opinion, to resist arrest, by any means necessary.
The sodium can be stored in kerosene. Probably still dangerous to ship. Just wondering–What good does a hazardous material sticker do–Do shippers examine the contents for safety??
And how do you think a juror felt when the fact that the victim had been rotting in a federal jail cell during the time he “abandoned” the sodium? That the juror was paid next to nothing to be a part of the facade, the sham, the charade of justice that these juror’s were tricked into sending a man off to some hole for a few years. Red meant for the state.
//While “mens rea” refers to intent, that pertains to the intent to commit the act, not necessarily the intent to commit an illegal act.//
In cases involving petty offenses, there is often not much of a /mens rea/ requirement. It is often entirely appropriate to prosecute someone for a misdemeanor because of their negligent behavior. I suspect many jurors have a pretty good sense of what level of mens rea would be required to justify various sentences, and if made aware of the sentence for particular crimes, would set their threshold appropriately. For that reason, crooked judges often seek to prevent jurors from finding out about sentencing: the judges know that jurors would recognize the sentences as excessive as applied to defendants’ actions and would thus refuse to impose them (nb: if twelve jurors would agree that a particular sentence would be excessive given the facts of a particular case, the sentence would be excessive; if the judge prevents a jury from knowing about such a sentence, such a judge should be permanently removed from public office for his deliberate efforts to violate the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
#54
Hazmat labeling identifies the general category of what’s being shipped. Usually an UN-Code (Here 4.3 hazardous when wet), and an NFPA 704 Chem hazard diamond pictogram. The truck would have to display the 704 on the exterior. Almost certainly, a responsible shipper would prominently label each box as “metallic sodium under mineral spirits” or some such. An MSDS callout would also be included. As would “ground ship only”.
The one substance that I’ve heard they really track tightly is liquid mercury. It ships in glass, and it cuts through aluminum like a hot knife through butter. A broken container on a airplane would be… very bad. Supermagnets also require special transportation.
al runyon, that was my impression, too. All the sodium I have encountered (as an technical person, but not a chemist) has been immersed in oil of one sort or another.
The issue with the sticker is that, unless the sticker is there, some shippers will ship via air even when you don’t ask for it and even when you check the “ground shipment” box (as Evertson did). In this instance, the parcel was shipped by air because that’s how the shipper delivered packages from Alaska to the lower 48. The sticker is supposed ensure that the shipper knows there is an actual safety reason to avoid air transport and ground shipment wasn’t just chosen because of price or whatever.
1.”There is no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” — Ayn Rand
2. The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. — Tacitus (A.D. 55?-130?)
“Good people do not need laws and bad people will break them anyway.” – Plato
“If we can just pass a few more laws, we could all be criminals!” – Vinnie Moscaritolo? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.” – Winston Churchill
What is wrong with federal prosecutors? Don’t they know that they are supposed to be cognizant of both the letter and the spirit of the law? What about the judge? Where did he park his brain? The jury also should be aware of both the spirtit and the letter of the law and should take the spirit of the law into account so that injustice can be prevented.
People need to look up http://fija.org/ and learn the real power of jurors. And I buy the jury handbook constitution and hand them out.
One place you can buy them is http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/ciru.html
I think the problem with jury nullification these days is that judges routinely instruct juries that they are only allowed to judge the facts of the case at hand, often relegating the jury to the function of a rubber stamp.
It’s worse than that. Judges often exclude as “irrelevant” because it would cause jurors to decide that a particular punishment would be excessive given the particular facts of the case before them. In other words, precisely because the information is relevant–just not in the way the judges would like.
It’s amazing how convoluted and bizarre so-called “Constitutional Law” becomes when it has to justify increasingly unconstitutional actions by the government. Often a criminal case will be effectively decided not by jurors who examine the facts of the case itself, but by judges who have examined vaguely similar cases but not the one at hand.
I wouldn’t count on juries to consistently uphold defendants’ rights. On the other hand, if cops knew that juries would be instructed not to construe against defendants any evidence derived from searches they deemed unreasonable, and not to convict a defendant of any crime for which the punishment would be excessive given the defendant’s actual actions, I would expect cops and prosecutors would behave more reasonably.
I found the way to fight injustice and tyranny at this very popular website… http://tonydapony.blogspot.com/2009/07/national-strike-nov-4th.html
T
4th Amendment cancelled in Los Angeles, CA
http://www.avhidesert.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=294&pid=2025#pid2025
read this then read citizens complaints at
http://www.topix.com/forum/city/lancaster-ca/T7K3B60IOD9KD3DL4
I believe this is actually happening all over our nation, as citizens are being made Criminals. No authority has been killed YET, but it’s only going to take one angry citizen to set this off.
Rights not to be invaded no longer exist in Los Angeles, and the authorities make up the laws as they see fit.
When I become your president, this crap will stop.
I saw nothing in the articles linked to that indicated that Evertson had been prevented from letting the jury know that he had been in jail at the time of the supposed abandonment. It would not surprise me if that had been the case but I read it as the jury going along with the judge’s interpretation of the law despite its absurdity.
One way I can think of letting the jury know that things are being hidden from them is to take the stand and refuse to take the oath, declaring that the judge has forbidden you from telling the whole truth. If the judge then claims that he interprets your restricted testimony as being the whole truth then you can declare that his intterpretation is irrelevant since it is what the oath taker interprets as being the whole truth which counts for an oath to be valid.
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