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The State
of Oregon vs. Mike Roselle
By Mike Roselle
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When it comes to civil
liberties, most people will remember
9/11 and the Patriot Act. But if you are a treehugger, you will
probably
remember when the federal government, and some states, started taking
the
gloves off back in the mid-eighties. The commencement was a series of
laws passed
to target a perceived eco-terrorist threat, following the widely
publicized
sawmill accident in Sonoma County
where a young mill worker was injured. A spike in a tree caused a saw
blade to
snap and hit the worker. It was no matter that the spike was placed by
an
enraged local landowner and not by any of the activists trying to
protect the
last old-growth Redwoods on the Pacific
Coast. The national
news media
cranked up the story that eco-terrorists were everywhere planning
violence and
a series of new laws were passed to deter them from wreaking havoc on
the
beleaguered timber industry.
Most of these new laws didn’t distinguish much between
property destruction, peaceful protest and acts of civil disobedience.
Within a
decade, every western state would have laws making it an offense,
subject to
imprisonment, to halt, impede, hinder, obstruct or delay a timber sale.
Some of
these laws, like the notorious Idaho
“Earth First! Law,” made it a felony to conspire to or advocate any of
those actions.
During debates on the House floor, outraged legislators said the law
was
intended to apply to professional radical environmentalists who
recruited
innocent kids from college campuses, and sent them off to block
legal-logging
operations, and take food out of the mouths of working families.
Imagine!
Back at Cove/Mallard Coalition International World
Headquarters in Dixie, Idaho
the response to the new felony law was predictable. We went to a bunch
of college
campuses with Uncle Ramon and Robert Hoyt and other professional
agitators.
Robert Hoyt had carefully crafted a song with the intent of breaking
the law
(it was vetted by our lawyers). We intended to recruit a bunch of new
students
to block, impede, halt, obstruct, and otherwise obliterate logging in
the
Cove/Mallard Timber Sale. We continued to block the road until the
U.S. Forest
Service was halted, impeded, blocked and obliterated in Federal
court. It
turned out that the logging in Cove/Mallard never was legal after
all.
Oregon, that
famed bastion of civil liberties, has, of course, been at the center of
the
efforts to nip this hippie treehugger rebellion in the bud longer than
anywhere
else. Whether it’s SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public
Participation)
suits, felony charges, random arrests, unconstitutional forest closures
or just
old fashioned police violence, Oregon
has seen it all. We have even seen the Sheriff’s department read us the
1875
Riot Act and arrest everybody on site, including the press, for a
simple sit-in
at the Pyramid Creek Timber Sale in the Cascades. As it turns out, you
actually
have to read the riot act before you can make any arrests.
So, with all of this in mind, about a year and a half ago I
went down to Ashland, in Southwest Oregon to join some local
environmentalists
from the Mazama Forest Defense who were protesting an old-growth timber
sale on
BLM lands in the Cow Creek watershed. I won’t piss off my lawyer by
discussing
the facts of the case, but somehow I got arrested and taken to the
Douglas
County Jail in Roseburg
and charged
with “Interfering With An Agricultural Operation,” Oregon’s
latest version of the Earth First! Law.
It’s been a year and a half and I still haven’t had a chance
to enter a plea, but a lot has happened since I was arrested. A number
of other
people have been arrested at various anti-logging protests since the
notorious
“Ag-Ops” law was enacted a couple of years ago. Most of these
defendants later
agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges. But, one case in Curry
County, on Oregon’s
southern coast, did make it in front of a Superior Court Judge before I
was to
appear in court in Roseburg.
Lauren
Regan, staff attorney for the Civil
Liberties Defense
Center
(cldc@efn.org) in Eugene,
filed a motion to dismiss my charges on the grounds that the law
violated Oregon’s
constitution. The Judge in this ultra-conservative, pro-logging county
agreed
and dismissed the case.
Right before Christmas, Lauren gave the Douglas
County district
attorney a copy of
the same motion she filed in Curry
County,
and said she intended to file it in this case as well. Even though the
Curry
County Judge had thrown out the charges, it seems that he was getting
pressure
from the state attorney general to go ahead with the case. By default,
it
seems, the first test of this law was going to be mine.
Floyd and I flew out to Roseburg
from Alabama for my
court
appearance in early January. Lauren was going to introduce a motion
that was
thicker than my rap sheet, which was now on the prosecutor’s desk. He
had to
spend his Christmas vacation poring over it and studying the case law.
He gave
a response that was prepared by the state attorney general’s office.
After
Lauren’s presentation, the Judge asked a few technical questions to
which
Lauren gave a five-minute response. The Prosecutor did his best, but
admitted
he was a bit confused. I was now convinced that the only person in the
room
that really understood what was going on here was Lauren. The rest of
us were
just trying to just look like we knew what was going on. But, by the
time I had
heard all the arguments, I sure felt like my constitutional rights had
been
violated.
The State of Oregon
seems to want to go to trial. Interfering with an agricultural
operation
carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail. The rap sheet that the
prosecutor provided the court contained numerous violations, including
about a
half dozen arrests for similar offenses in Oregon
over the last twenty years. This probably makes me the worst possible
defendant
a lawyer could ever have. The Civil Liberties Defense Center has been
monitoring the Ag-Ops Law since it was first debated in the State
legislature.
The Judge will issue a decision sometime in the near future. I’ll keep
you
posted.
Meanwhile, in another quasi-legal matter, the House Ways and
Means committee is investigating a number of environmental
organizations with
ties to civil disobedience, or as they call it, “illegal activity”.
Attorneys
for the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) have advised Randy Hayes and I,
among
others, to expect a subpoena to appear in front of the committee
sometime in
the near future. The committee is responding to pressure from a few
wise-use
groups, including Ron Arnold’s Center for the Defense of Free
Enterprise that
has convinced some committee members that RAN’s famed banner-hangers
are
engaging in some sort of tax fraud. This is based on a narrow
definition of
civil disobedience, long rejected by advocates of civil liberty, that
only acts
that violate unjust laws are truly civil. Acts against private
individuals or
corporations, this reasoning goes, cannot be targets of non-violent
direct
action and still be protected as free speech. However, in a world where
corporate power is rapidly eclipsing that of the government’s, and in
cases
where corporate behavior sometimes violates existing environmental
laws, this
narrow definition is in itself a denial of our basic right to free
speech.
Environmental groups often have no other recourse than to
directly intervene in the commission of a crime in order for either the
government to take the necessary action or for the corporation to
change their
illegal behavior. Given the great economic disparity between the
environmentalists and the industrialist developers they oppose, the
ability to
generate coverage in the news media (itself controlled by the same
corporations) is difficult. Direct Action is often the only way smaller
public
interest groups can level the playing field. In most cases, any actual
damages
incurred during a protest are slight, relative to the business of the
company
being targeted. Usually the setbacks are smaller than the disruptions
they
would encounter during a labor dispute, an extreme weather event, a
traffic jam
or even a post Super Bowl hangover. Simply put, if we want to halt the
destruction of the environment it is not enough to challenge unjust
laws. We
also have a civic responsibility to do everything possible to see that
existing
environmental laws are obeyed, especially when the government refuses
to do so.
There is one thing I’m fairly certain about in this ongoing
campaign of government intimidation toward environmental activists. It
is most
often the fear of the law and not the law itself that deters activists.
If we
are afraid of exercising our rights to stand up to those who would
profit from
the destruction of our planet, then the government has already
succeeded. If
more people would have stood up to Joseph McCarthy during his Red-Scare
witch hunts,
his little reign of terror would have been stopped in its tracks before
it
began. McCarthy often ignored people who were not afraid of his House
Committee
on Un-American Activities and instead he focused on those who he could
easily
intimidate. This created a panic amongst those intimidated, and brought
on and
era of self-censorship. We are within our rights to stand up for the
Earth, and
to engage in the time-honored tradition of civil disobedience as
pioneered by
the late Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma
Gandhi, to
name only a few. We need to stand up for our rights and rally behind
those who
are being singled out. With the help of people like Lauren Regan and
the Civil
Liberties Defense Center, we plan to do just that. United we stand,
divided we
fall.
Finally, last month I was in Knoxville,
Tennessee at a meeting on
Mountain Justice
Summer, a campaign being planned for the southern Appalachians
to address the ongoing rape of the countryside by coal companies.
Several of
the participants of the Mountain Justice meeting were planning a summer
of
civil disobedience in the same fashion as Redwood Summer and, of
course,
Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the seminal anti-segregation campaign.
An air of
paranoia seemed to permeate the air, and much of the discussion
centered on the
issue of security. Safe houses, vouchers, applications and
questionnaires,
among other provisions were being suggested to deal with
"infiltrators" and provocateurs. I was getting down right sentimental,
this reminding me of my earlier days with the Yippies! But,
infiltrating the
Yippies was like infiltrating a marshmallow, as my old friend Vinegar
Ben used
to say. We once had a Federal agent living with us in Miami
during the Republic Convention of 1972 that we kept around because he
had a
car. When we had important meetings at the house, we'd send him out
shopping or
more often, Dumpster diving. We didn't really have any secrets, but we
would have
been disappointed if we weren't infiltrated. My advice; don't worry
about the
infiltrators if they have a car you can use.
The road trip
continues for Mike and Floyd, who were last spotted in a Red State, agitating
and seeking general ruckus.
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