More Government-Judicial Insanity Violating the Rights of Innocent Americans
Builder sent to jail for flood mitigation
This kind of thing drives me crazy! Citizens, even when going the extra mile to make sure they do not violate any federal regulations can still go to jail for violating regulations that do not exist.
An Idaho man is being sent to prison for meeting his local government’s demands during a subdivision development to fix a drainage problem that periodically had left the town of Driggs flooded, after federal officials then said their regulations banned such work.
The dire situation for developer Lynn Moses is being publicized by Bryan Fischer, the chief of Idaho Values Alliance, who said the “crime” for which Moses has been sentenced to 18 months in prison was, “Protecting the city of Driggs from flooding.”
Moses’ lawyer, Blake Atkin of Salt Lake City, confirmed the circumstances of the case, explaining that although the federal government repeatedly has denied having jurisdiction over the work involved, an opinion shared by the U.S. Supreme Court, Moses nevertheless was convicted on charges relating to his work on the streambed of Teton Creek, an intermittent runoff channel that has water in it for probably eight weeks out of the year.
“Worse, Mr. Moses has been convicted of ‘pollut(ing) a spawning area for Yellowstone cutthroat trout,’ despite the fact that there have been no fish in this stream bed for more than 150 years,” Fischer wrote. “[A resident] who has lived near the flood channel for 18 years, says he has never seen fish in this stream bed. And it’s not even possible for the stream bed to serve as a spawning ground since it only has water two months out of every year in the first place.”
Moses hired an engineer and contacted the federal government to obtain permission the project, and the Corps of Engineers told him there was no federal jurisdiction since it was an intermittent stream without any regular water flow.
The same conversation took place several times over the years, including in the 1990s when a Corps of Engineers staff member tried to convince a federal prosecutor to bring a case against Moses.
“The U.S. attorney told him to take a hike since the Corps had no jurisdictional authority to initiate legal action,” Fischer said. “According to former state legislator Lee Gagner, the Corps ‘discussed his process many times with him, but could not show where they had jurisdiction on the seasonal, intermittent stream,’ Gagner adds, ‘[T]o this day they do not have written rules indicating this to be true,” Fischer said.
Atkins said that very issue has been raised several times in the course of the case against Moses, but no court ruling ever has addressed it.
Then came a new a decision to pursue the case, and the conviction after jurors were told by Judge Lynn Winmill to disregard Moses’ attempts to submit the project to the Corps of Engineers and statements about U.S. government determinations regarding the channel in the 1980s and 1990s.
However, on the day Moses was sentenced to 18 months in prison, the U.S. Supreme Court released its Rapanos case, in which Justice Antonin Scalia confirmed the Clean Water Act gives the federal government jurisdiction only over “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water,” not intermittent streams.
In this climate of fear and government tyranny, no man or woman can ever feel safe from the heavy hand of a government out of control.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=71452
