Oregon Refuge Occupiers Were Protesting, Lawyer Says
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Version 0 of 1. PORTLAND, Ore. — The armed demonstrators who took over a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon this year were attempting to reclaim land that they believed was improperly seized by the federal government, a lawyer for one of the group’s leaders told a packed courtroom on Tuesday. Marcus Mumford, the lawyer for Ammon Bundy, one of seven defendants on trial here on federal conspiracy and weapons charges, said in an opening statement that the group was trying to draw attention to the government’s mismanagement of public lands, and to protest the treatment by federal agencies of ranching families in Oregon. His remarks came during opening statements in the trial of Mr. Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy and five other activists who led the six-week occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which began on Jan. 2, the latest flare-up in a long-running conflict over who should control millions of acres of publicly owned land in the West. “Mr. Bundy complied with the law — the government did not,” Mr. Mumford told the 12-member jury. “The federal government didn’t have the right to own” the 187,000-acre refuge, established in 1908 as a land preserve by President Theodore Roosevelt. Ryan Bundy, who is acting as his own lawyer in the case, told the jury that for his part, he never sought to harm anyone, but felt a responsibility, derived from the principles of the Declaration of Independence — from which he quoted at length — to stand up to tyranny. “We had no intention to do evil, and the evidence will show this,” he said. But federal prosecutors, in their opening presentation to the panel earlier on Tuesday, said the armed group had posed a threat of violence from the first day, when it cleared the refuge “at gunpoint,” until the final hours of the occupation, when the last holdouts told law enforcement officials that they were prepared to die. The occupiers’ words and actions were never peaceful, Geoffrey A. Barrow, an assistant United States attorney, told the court. They trained in weapons and hand-to-hand combat while living at the refuge, Mr. Barrow said. They used earth movers to build defensive barricades. “They wanted the world to know that they had taken it from the federal government,” he said. The takeover of the refuge, in eastern Oregon, lasted nearly six weeks. It set off a national debate about homegrown right-wing militias, public lands, constitutional rights and police powers, especially after one of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum, 54, was shot and killed by the Oregon State Police in late January after he raced his truck toward a police roadblock and then appeared to reach for his weapon. In all, 26 people were indicted on felony conspiracy, weapons and theft charges — with the government contending that the occupiers conspired to impede federal employees at the refuge from performing their duties by using force, intimidation or threats, and that they stole government property and took weapons into a federal property. The trial of the Bundys and five followers is the first of two expected trials stemming from the refuge seizure, and on Tuesday, the lawyers and defendants — three of whom are representing themselves — outlined the stories they said the evidence would show. Federal prosecutors intend to present physical evidence that suggests a threat far beyond mere words. On Tuesday, they filed a list of potential exhibits that included dozens of pistols and rifles recovered from the refuge site and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Other evidence listed by the prosecution was created by the defendants themselves, including videos and photos taken of one another on their cellphones, posts on Facebook and recordings of the almost daily statements that members of the occupation group made to reporters and television cameras at the refuge. Defense lawyers have said that the occupiers were legally exercising free speech rights, and that openly carrying a weapon in Oregon is also legal. Judge Anna J. Brown of United States District Court for the District of Oregon said in her jury instructions that disagreeing with the opinions of the defendants was not enough to support a guilty verdict. “Defendants’ political beliefs are not on trial,” she said. “Defendants cannot be convicted based on unpopular beliefs.” Whether unpopular or not, what the defendants believed — and what they said about those beliefs at the time — will define much of the case. And at least one defense strategy so far is to suggest that maybe, at least in the case of David Fry, who was the last occupier to surrender and leave the refuge, those beliefs might not always have made sense. Mr. Fry’s lawyer, Per C. Olson, said in his opening statement that Mr. Fry, 28, was not a leader of the group, or even really much of a participant, and had left his guns at home in Ohio before driving out to join the occupation in early January. “He was a little bit of an oddball, if you will,” Mr. Olson said, with patterns of thought that were “not typical and not always rational.” But then, after Mr. Finicum’s death, Mr. Olson said, Mr. Fry changed. Fearing a police raid on the compound, he began carrying a shotgun, and said in front a camera, “I’m prepared to make a stand — I’m prepared to die,” Mr. Olson said. Mr. Olson said jurors would see in that arc of psychology a man who had not committed a crime of trying to intimidate or impede anyone. “It was all in defense,” Mr. Olson said. The trial is expected to last about two months. |