Bundy and Malhuer Prosections?

Seems like the Feds can't get a conviction. Stunning to me that people can engage in armed standoff's, defy court orders, disrupt the normal proceedings of life with armed checkpoints, takeover public property and prevent it's normal functions, destroy said property, fire shots and lie about it to authorities (referring to the unaccounted shots at the Finicum stop) and the principals go walking off scot free, whatever scot free means.

Why no significant convictions?

People also ask

 

Where did the term scot free come from?

 

In fact, “scot”, in this case, is from the Old Norse word “skot” meaning something to the effect of “payment” or “contribution”. In English, “scot” initially just meant “tax”. The phrase scot free was first used in reference to municipal tax levies.Feb 2, 2012

Truly amazing!

Because the prosecutors went for the biggest charge they could find, and charged them all on conspiracy, instead of all the lesser charges they could easily have proven. As I recall, anyway.

Any bets on how long it takes this thread to get locked?

"A federal jury on Thursday found Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy and five co-defendants not guilty of conspiring to prevent federal employees from doing their jobs through intimidation, threat or force during the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

The Bundy brothers and occupiers Jeff Banta and David Fry also were found not guilty of having guns in a federal facility. Kenneth Medenbach was found not guilty of stealing government property, and a hung jury was declared on Ryan Bundy's charge of theft of FBI surveillance cameras." (source: Jury finds all Oregon standoff defendants not guilty)

Yeah, I can see the conspiracy might be hard to prove, but how did anybody get off on the other, easily proven charges? All I can think is that the jury must have had enough people who sympathized with them and ignored the facts.

Jury Nullification????????

I don't know that I can offer any insight into these specific cases, but having spent around 30 years with the DOJ, and a few years before that as a military cop and prosecutor, I've got a few thoughts.

First, most charged cases end up being resolved by guilty pleas . . . historically in the range of 80 to 90% of all the cases brought by the DOJ. Generally, that's a reflection of the fact that the evidence is pretty iron-clad, and that the defendant has therefore decided that accepting responsibility is in his best interest.The remaining cases--those that are contested in court--tend to be those in which the defendant has a genuine chance of being acquitted. There are myriad reasons, but it generally revolves around some weakness in the evidence, a lack of jury appeal, and/or a defendant's willingness to fight. The general rule is that those cases that are contested are those in which the government knew it would have the most difficulty obtaining a conviction.

Juries generally get it right, but they also can act emotionally or irrationally. In the last few years I was with the DOJ, I headed up a number of mock trial exercises, in which DOJ lawyers presented an abbreviated case to a group of individuals approximating the jury pool in the jurisdiction where the cases would be tried. After deliberations, I was part of the debriefing process, trying to analyze and understand what would have an impact on a jury. Most of these jurors understood the evidence, but some were way out in left field. And, perhaps not surprisingly, factors that would not, in a perfect world, make a difference had an impact on some jurors. Stuff like the tie worn by an advocate, the tone of voice of a lawyer making her closing argument, and other things that really had no relationship to objective guilt.

Finally, in high profile cases, things do tend to get all mucked up. Generally speaking, the agents, prosecutors, and paralegals who put together a case and are responsible for presenting it in court are highly competent. But, every time the specter of publicity enters the picture, an array of political appointees and career executives--often with no trial experience or even worse, an undistinguished record as a litigator--jump into the trial preparation. It's enormously time-consuming, and counterproductive. Sound strategies are abandoned because some weenie whose only experience is in political campaigns offers his amazing insight. The careerist who was shunted out of the courtroom because of his incompetence becomes the master strategist. Truly, the higher profile the case, the more the DOJ seems to do to screw it up. Combine that with the fact that contested cases are already likely to be less than perfect, and . . . voila! . . . acquittal.

Having said that, the majority of litigated cases end up with convictions; the prosecutors know what they're doing. They just fervently hope that their case does not end up being viewed as one of importance, because it often diminishes the odds of winning.