I grew up in the next town west of Burns, Oregon, where so-called militia men are occupying a federal building in protest of the federal sentencing of some local ranchers for arson. If you know anything about how sparsely populated Eastern Oregon is, that means Burns is a two hour drive from my hometown. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on and around ranches in that part of the world and know the issues there pretty well.
So I’d like to congratulate Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie for writing the first non-hysterical piece I’ve read about the issue in the mainstream press. Bouie seems to get that such disputes over land in the west tend to be highly localized issues and these tensions arise because the federal government owns the vast majority of the land. Many reporters have tried to shoehorn the story into some weird narrative about race, class, and violence that doesn’t make much sense for a couple of ranchers who are guilty of setting a controlled burn on federal property. Burning property you don’t own without permission is obviously ill-advised and illegal, but a controlled burn on a hundred or so acres of high desert is a fairly commonplace land management tactic among local ranches.
But Bouie’s piece also confirmed a piece of information that I had already suspected:
Most people forget that domestic terrorism in the mid-1990s did not begin and end with the Oklahoma City bombing. Oddly enough, terrorism against the federal government in Oregon was a significant reason why federal penalties for arson in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 have ended up being enforced so often. In October of 1996, eco-terrorist group the Earth Liberation Front burned down a forest ranger station about 30 miles outside of Eugene, Oregon that did over $5 million in damage. In 1997, the ELF burned a Bureau of Land Management facility in, yes, Burns, Oregon. The ELF committed arson and other destructive acts all over the country for the next four years, but most of their crimes—ranging from tree-spiking to burning a million dollars worth of SUVs at an auto-dealership—were committed in Oregon.
It wasn’t until 2007 that the feds were finally able to convict and sentence the ELF terrorists responsible. Sentences ranged from 156 months to 37 months. Comparatively speaking, it seems ridiculous that, while deserving some punishment, the Hammonds’s crime of burning a hundred some acres of insignificant public land in one of the most sparsely populated places in the country would rate a similar sentence to those involved an actual terror cell that did millions in damage and specifically targeted the federal government.
I don’t know the legal vagaries involved, but interestingly enough, the same judge who handled the ELF sentencing is also responsible for sentencing the Hammonds. U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken seems to have some libertarian sympathies—she once ruled parts of the Patriot Act violate the Fourth Amendment—so she doesn’t seem like the kind of judge who would throw the book at a couple of ranchers with bad judgment, unless she was bound by the mandatory minimums of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
The Bundy family from Nevada who is leading the standoff in Burns has its own political agenda, and I’m not sure the publicity is helpful to the Hammonds or the ranchers in Eastern Oregon. But on the narrow point of whether the Hammonds deserve a five-year sentence for their crimes, it does strike me as disproportionate and unjust.
Update: I still commend Bouie for getting the big picture right, but I’ve subsequently realized this passage I’ve quoted has some factual problems that are thankfully irrelevant to the larger points I was making. One, the ranchers are father and son not brothers. Two, the trial court imposed a sentence for the Hammonds and the appeals court reversed it. The way Bouie writes it, it sounds like there was it an appeal before trial court ruled.
