Moscow, Idaho is a town with little or nothing to recommend it besides a well-stocked food bank, but once a year it's a good place to visit for the prevailing surreal atmosphere that descends on the town, and apparently all its inhabitants, for the annual Autumn running of the Earth First!ers into the Federal Building.
There are trials, sentencing, and the like all year long for the great unwashed who come to make trouble for the Freddies in Cove/Mallard, but each year there's one big trial, and it's the one Freddies are sure to botch the most. This year was especially promising because the defendants, through some monumental failure of the criminal justice system, were each appointed one public defender apiece.
As I was in need of a few laughs and because I had an expense account, I traveled to Moscow to watch the proceedings. I had very good seats the entire five days, but I still couldn't get much of a handle on just what the hell was going on most of the time.
It was apparent from the outset that the protesters would prevail. This was due to the presence in the courtroom of John Preston, a freddie cop who continues to plague the government with his complete inability to prevaricate properly when on the stand. He lies, of course, but he just can't ever seem to work the logic out right, and he ends up doing things like placing himself in two different National Forests at once, for instance. It's always very embarrassing for his superiors.
Additionally, these protesters were top shelf. While they lacked the color of past defendant groups, they had a certain angry, knowing glare about them that gave a disquieting mood to the entire endeavor.
And they were armed to the teeth. It was as if they had employed an army of attorneys. In fact, I asked one of the attorneys: Is it really fair to gang up on the government like that? Twenty-four against one? He said he thought it was, of course, but that's because he's an attorney and required by law to speak nonsense.
The proceedings took five days. The cost to the government for the 12 defense attorneys was exactly 20 cents per second. In a dull moment I worked out the math and discovered that the EF! Dream Team cost the government 26,640 dollars during the trial. The court spent 12 dollars per minute to watch a video of Robert Hoyt sing "I Hate Money." See what I mean? Things are weird in courts.
The proceedings, due to the presence of lawyers in the courtroom, were utterly incomprehensible and I will not even attempt to reproduce them. Apparently what happened is a bunch of people with college degrees in subjects like "Ecology" and "Environmental Science" stood around one morning on a road that was being built to log trees in the notorious Cove/Mallard timber sales, site of numerous protests since 1992. They took issue with this timber sale for obvious reasons, primarily its location directly between the Gospel Hump Wilderness Area and the River of No Return Wilderness Area, a five and a half million acre complex of unroaded, wild country in central Idaho.
In the course of their standing in the road and, in two cases, sitting on tripods placed in the middle of the road, drunk loggers would occasionally file by and shoot at them. Others would tackle them and hold them at gunpoint.
At last the County Sheriff arrived, which is when the situation started to get really bad. You see, before the law enforcement arrived the only thing to worry about was the logging crew, and they were all far too drunk to shoot straight or think clearly. But as luck would have it, the Sheriff's Deputy had been asleep, so his blood alcohol content had decreased. Since he was much more on top of things, he was put in charge of toppling one of the tripods down the embankment and killing its inhabitant. Well, you can imagine what a ruckus that caused.
In the end nobody was killed, because the tripod occupant reasoned that he should abandon his post and take his chances among the raving lunatics on the ground. At this point the cops gave the loggers leave to go back to their drinking games, thanked them for their invaluable assistance, rounded up the protesters and threw them in jail.
So as you can see it was quite obvious the protesters were guilty. But that's the thing about lawyers. These lawyers so confounded things that by the time the second day rolled around I wasn't sure about anything any more. In fact, for a minute I even thought it might be reasonable to cite one of the loggers. That's how crazy things can get in these courtrooms when you put lawyers in them.
The judge, fortunately, has some experience with these suit- wearing rascals, and he saw through their empty ploys immediately. He found them all guilty and sentenced them to seven days in jail and a five hundred dollar fine. No probation. One woman received 15 days in jail because she had been causing trouble earlier by requesting that the Forest Supervisor talk to her. Another woman received 20 days because she was on probation, but I think it might have had something to do with what she told the judge when she made her so-called "request for leniency."
Prior to sentencing, each defendant got a few moments to express remorse and promise to be good. It was the only time during the whole trial that the defendants spoke. I did not detect any remorse. Their statements were desperate, articulate pleas for justice to be served not for them, but for the wild, doomed forests and streams of Cove/Mallard. They each spoke movingly about the magic of this giant place, and bitterly about the bizarre and sick sequence of events that has them sitting in jail now, as I write this, for speaking out for the last, biggest forest in the contiguous United States.
See you next year.
By the time you get this paper the two women who got the longest sentences may still be in jail (Jill got 15 days, Sarah got 20). Write to Jill Ondrey, Latah County Jail, Moscow, ID 83638 until November 7; Sarah Seeds-Willner, same address until November 12.
For more information contact the Cove Mallard/Last Wilderness Defense at PO Box 9970, Moscow, ID 83638.