East of the Cascade Mountains, Oregon is largely bitterbrush and high desert. Virtually no one lives there, and compared with the populous and rainy Willamette Valley to the west, agriculture is difficult. Unless you’re from the area — I was raised there — it’s hard to appreciate the sense of space, let alone understand the hotly contested land dispute between the federal government and ranchers-turned-militiamen who have occupied a federal building in Burns, Oregon.
Most people on the East Coast have no idea how much land the federal government controls out west. Over half of Oregon is under federal control, and that proportion is much higher in eastern Oregon. (Although it could be worse: The federal government controls 85 percent of Nevada’s land.) If you’re dependent on the land for your livelihood, as almost everyone in Burns is, you will inevitably have to deal with a federal government not known for being especially accommodating.
The current dispute involves Dwight Hammond and his son Steven, Oregon ranchers who burned 129 acres of federal land. Controlled burns of this size, even on public lands adjacent to private range, are a common land management tool. However, the Hammonds failed to get the necessary permission from the federal government before doing so, and they were also accused of setting the fire to destroy evidence they were poaching deer.
Tried before the U.S. district court for Oregon in 2012, the Hammonds were found guilty of arson on federal property, a crime that comes with a mandatory minimum sentence of five years. But the original trial judge, Michael Hogan, chose instead to sentence the 73-year-old Dwight to three months in prison and the younger Hammond to one year, calling the mandatory minimums unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual.” The Department of Justice challenged the sentencing and found a receptive hearing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals: And so, after seeming to have done their time, the Hammonds were ordered by U.S. Chief District Judge Ann Aiken to serve the remaining four years dictated by the mandatory minimum sentences.
This injustice was seized upon by the family of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy — who made national news in 2014 leading an armed standoff with the feds over cattle grazing. Bundy’s sons Ammon and Ryan arrived in Oregon in December and by January 2 were leading a group of armed protesters occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge building.
Let’s stipulate, as the lawyers like to say, that, on the basic question of whether the Hammonds deserved five-year sentences, the original trial judge had a point. The mandatory minimums for arson on federal property were set by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which was passed in response to the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Hammonds are no Timothy McVeighs.
The law has been used to prosecute actual attacks on the federal government, including some in rural Oregon. In 1996, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) burned a forest ranger station near Oakridge, causing $5 million in damage to a federal building. The next year the group torched a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) facility in, yes, Burns. The ELF also torched a meatpacking plant in Redmond and a car dealership in Eugene and committed all sorts of destructive acts at public and private facilities in Oregon — and elsewhere in the country — between 1996 and 2001.
When 10 members of an ELF terrorist cell were convicted and sentenced in 2007, their prison terms ranged from as much as 13 years to as little as 3. The idea that a couple of naughty ranchers guilty of scorching some high-desert scrubland should be treated like building-burning terrorists is absurd.
Ranchers near Burns have clashed with the BLM and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since the 1970s, harassed, they claim, by a federal government trying to get its hands on private lands in order to expand the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. However, it’s far from clear that the excessive sentences for the Hammonds are part of some plot to steal their property, as the Bundys have charged. And many decent and hardworking people in Burns have made it known they don’t want out-of-state interlopers and sketchy militiamen fighting their local land-use battles.
This episode is particularly frustrating because it distracts from the Obama administration’s aggressive moves to declare western lands off-limits to commercial use — when not attempting outright land-grabs. One example: The BLM is trying to seize thousands of acres from ranchers and other private owners near the Red River in Texas. According to the BLM, dry land as far as a mile from the river counts as the bank of the river, making it federal property.
But national attention is focused, instead, on the Oregon standoff, where the Bundys are doing their best to make legitimate concerns about federal abuse of rural landowners look like the paranoid obsession of kooks and extremists.
