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Tim DeChristopher's Courageous Bid to Save Our World
In March, Tim DeChristopher was convicted of two felony counts for a nonviolent act of civil disobedience. Acting out of his deepest convictions and his abiding concern for the survival of humankind, Tim bid on oil and gas leases on federal land that he didn't have the means to pay for. On Tuesday, he could be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in prison for his actions.
Tim DeChristopher, who disrupted a federal auction of oil and gas leases, now faces as many as 10 years in prison. (Courtney Sargent / Deseret News)
The auction Tim disrupted was being conducted during the final weeks of the George W. Bush administration, in what many believed was a push to sell one last batch of public leases before President Obama took office. Tim's intention at the December 2008 auction was to prevent the parcels, some of them on scenic land near Arches and Canyonlands national parks, from going to oil and gas companies.
On the eve of Tim's trial, I went to Salt Lake City to give a concert for his supporters at his church with my daughter, Bethany, and cellist Rufus Cappadocia. I will return to Salt Lake City to support him and his cause on Tuesday.
Tim is a hero to me, the kind of hero Peter, Paul and Mary stood up for consistently over the last 50 years. Throughout American history, acts of civil disobedience have led to change. Think about the Underground Railroad that helped escaped slaves to freedom, or about the courageous actions of people like Rosa Parks, who refused to stay in the back of the bus simply because of their skin color. Without this kind of defiance of unjust laws, our country would likely still be denying people of color basic freedoms.
Now Tim has taken a stand against federal energy policies and the way they further global warming. At our concert for him, Bethany and I sang "If I Had a Hammer" and "Blowin' in the Wind," the songs Peter, Paul and Mary sang at the 1963 March on Washington where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. Why? Because Tim's act of civil disobedience grew out of a long American tradition of conscience.
The judge should and will render his judgment in the case of DeChristopher, or "Bidder 70" as he was known at the auction. Part of committing an act of civil disobedience is facing the penalties. But because Tim's act was part of an attempt to prevent greater harm to humankind, I hope the judge will be merciful and will give him a token or suspended sentence.
At his trial, Tim was prevented from explaining the ethical and moral motivation for his acts to the jury. It is appalling that both the judge and the government's prosecution team have pursued Tim's civil disobedience trial as if he were a simple criminal who broke the law without reason or conscience. Doing so deprived him of the opportunity to sway the jury with the moral force of his motive.
In their sentencing memo, the government's attorneys wrote: "A significant prison term will promote respect for the law.... To be sure, a federal prison term here will deter others from entering a path of criminal behavior." The same might have been said of King, had our government been so odiously disrespectful of his moral courage at the time.
The prosecution has maintained that Tim's actions cost the Bureau of Land Management — and hence taxpayers — hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, after the auction was concluded, an environmental group got an injunction against many of the leases on the grounds that the environmental consequences of drilling hadn't been adequately considered. Subsequently, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pulled back the majority of them for further review. Eleven of the 14 auction parcels on which Tim made the highest bid later were pulled back by the government for reanalysis, so his action cost the government nothing on those. As to the remaining three parcels, if they are brought to auction again, they might well fetch more than Tim's original bid. So how did this cost the government money?
It's true that Tim entered the auction building with the intention of impeding its progress, but the specifics of his actions were not premeditated. He has said that the option of becoming a bidder didn't enter his mind until he got to the registration desk, at which point he realized that registering as a bidder might be the best way to derail the auction, or at least to save some parcels of lands from despoliation.
His objective, of course, was to call the entire process into question and ignite public concern over the relationship between such auctions and global warming's ominous shadow. I believe he achieved this mightily.
There is a massive complicity in America today between the corporations that fund elections and the officeholders they elect. Actions like Tim's are aimed at disrupting that complicity. For our children, for our country and for the world, we should honor his courage and self-sacrifice and pledge to follow in his footsteps, each in our own way.
30 Comments so far
Show AllA shame that the jury didn't tell the judge to go to hell. Here in the UK (and I don't mean to claim any kind of moral high ground - we have little enough ourselves to be proud of), juries have from time to time entered "perverse" decisions. A good jury can find someone not guilty not only because the prosecution has not made a water tight case, but because the law itself is unjust.
I agree wholeheartedly, secretarybird.
It is to the UK's credit that its law and government gives juries some wiggle room to conscientiously acquit defendants in civil disobedience cases, even if minor laws and ordinances, e.g. trespassing prohibitions, are violated, and property is damaged.
In Amerika, Britain's nouveau capitalist runaway child, property and the mechanisms of property-ownership, including land auctions, are sacrosanct.
And Amerika is particularly rigidly intolerant of concepts like "jury nullification", which empowers ordinary persons of conscience to refuse to go along for the ride when the law is egregiously being an ass, and a rabid ass to boot.
Uncle Sam don't play that.
May I remind the two of you of the OJ Simpson case...where the jury nullified the court's instructions and the state's case? The jury in the DeChristopher case could well have done the same thing...and must have made a conscious decision not to do so.
Unless they were nothing but a set of pre-programmed zombies...which, it being a Utah jury, can not be ruled out.
Yarrow's simpering plea for mercy from the right-wing hanging judge in this case is a bit stomach-turning. The prosecution is not seeking the full ten-year term. They want blood, but sensing the public revulsion towards this prosection, they'll take less blood than they want. Still, the judge in this case may give them all they want and could ask for. The sentencing was delayed to allow the public's attention to be drawn away from the immorality of the prosecution and conviction...and the sentence (whatever sentence) that will be imposed.
Norway and the debt-limit fiasco may well have done the job.
And then again, amazingly sometimes jury nullification still does take place in civil disobedience trials in the United States, despite the judge's unfavorable rulings at the behest of the prosecution.
Several years ago, my law partner and I represented two of three Greenpeace activists who stood trial in Midland, Michigan on misdemeanor charges of trespassing. The alleged crime consisted of the defendants having "trespassed" upon the effluent discharge pipe of Dow Chemical Company embedded in the bottom of the Tittabawassee River. The conspirators committed this heinous act by donning wet suits and diving down to insert red "Stop Sign" plugs into the outlet holes in the pipe to prevent further discharge of toxic waste by Dow into the Great Lakes watershed.
The crime was of course videotaped by the assembled batallions of local police and Dow security officers. Locally, the prosecution of these three dangerous outside agitators (my client was a Swede, the other two were American citizens from New York and Massachusetts) was a high profile law-and-order event.
Predictably, on pretrial motions filed by the government prosecutor the judge ruled inadmissible any testimony about the motivations of the demonstrators, and would permit no testimony from experts about Dow's extensive history of discharging dangerous pollutants into the Great Lakes watershed. Our proposed expert witnesses who the jury was never allowed to hear was a professor of environmental science from Ontario, and an octogenarian from Saginaw named Art Neumann - the first executive director of the national cold water fisheries conservation organization Trout Unlimited - who wanted to tell the story of how one day when he was about 12 years old there had been a major spill into the river from Dow's Midland facility that killed every single fish in the Tittabawassee for several miles downstream.
The judge having forbidden the jury from hearing evidence about the common law defense of necessity nor anything having to do with the First Amendment, the case proceeded towards deliberations and verdict on the usual, garden variety criminal law issue of whether there was reasonable doubt that each defendant had, in fact, made physical contact with Dow's underwater pipe. (One can not trespass by swimming, diving, floating, or boating on a navigable river, as a matter of law).
Neither my client, nor my law partner's client, testified. Because the videotapes of the defendants showed the demonstrators brandishing their Stop Sign plugs in the air, diving underwater, and then emerging without the plugs when they came back up to the surface to be immediately arrested, had the government proved a physical trespass?
If there was reasonable doubt, then the law says the verdict must be Not Guilty.
The third defendant - who represented himself - didn't testify either. He did, however, exercise his right to give a final argument to the jury. The gentleman from New York told why Greenpeace had come to Midland to focus public attention upon the dangers of industrial pollutants in the Great Lakes watershed, and a bit of Dow's known history regarding the manufacture of napalm, benzine, and dioxin at their Midland complex. He talked about his own environmental activism and the sincerity of his codefendants' beliefs. And he assured the jury that when he dove down with his Stop Sign plug, the water in the Tittabawassee was so murky and muddy he had no way of seeing whether anyone actually had made physical contact with Dow's effluent pipe that afternoon. I mean, the Dow public relations department had gone on record assuring the public that the antics of these Greenpeace outsiders had not damaged company property, nor disrupted the ordinary operations of Dow Chemical Corporation in any way.....
Five of the six jurors on that case were employees, former employees, or relatives of employees of Dow. They deliberated about an hour, and found all three not guilty. Everybody walked. Reasonable doubt. Greenpeace held a celebratory press conference on the courthouse steps, and moved on to target other major corporate polluters in northern Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.
It's rare moments like that which go a long way to hold back cynicism and despair.
Bill from Saginaw
Thank you.
There are so many competing factors at work in your story, I can't begin to filter out enough of any one against the others that led the jury to acquit (god bless them). {Other than it not being Utah.}
Were you able to speak to any of the jurors after, and get a sense of what motivated them? Do you think it was the flaw in the state's circumstantial case raised by the third defendant that led them to find reasonable doubt? Could it have been antipathy to Dow?
The government's been getting so many verdicts on dubious terrorism-related cases lately that we need small rays of hope like this.
Thank-you, Tim, for your selfless activism on behalf of the Earth and her children. And thank-you, Peter, for your continued pursuit of a better America. This case is going to become a platform for debate about who the real criminals are. I do not feel hopeful that the judge will be lenient.
Ah, Utah. The most polluted state in the US and where they shot Joe Hill.
Heroes seem to be only the people the oligarchy designates
Nature depreciates the dollar
======================
See the justice system that only works for corporations, where the only votes that count are the money votes. It was justice that was auctioned off here, as well as the environment, into slavery. The well dressed and wordy, but not worthy, apes of Justice keep the dollars, while the environment slave is to be whipped to work, polluted, and exhausted till it dies, even devoured by the jackals of fossil fuels corporations.
See that the government that only works for corporations, where the only votes that count are the money votes. Representation pimps work for the dollars of corporations. Laws are tailored to the highest bidder. Interests contrary to the wishes of corporations will not even be heard or discussed. Interests of the environment and people are off the table, kept out of rooms, away from office buildings, and locked in goal. They do not exist in the minds of lawmakers. Climate change can be even legislated away. Economic growth, population growth, and taxation management, are all to grow the flow of corporate dollars. With such a system of development and governance, behaviour of the monster is predictable.
This is the dollar-ocracy. While the dollar print runs the world trade markets, and pays billion dollar bases to sit top of every other nations treasurey chest, the overweight apes dressed in suits and ties, who consider that they are fully in charge, do swagger, thump or order the bombing of who so ever it pleases them. Any who even threaten to interfere with the workings, the naked frolics of the dollar bidding processes is the huge threat to the doller banana minds of corporate dollar apes, filled with soft delights only large amounts of dollars can buy. The dollar is the economic fuel that drives the engines that devour nature, produces toxic waste, builds weapons, and destroys nations. The balance sheets of nature devourers only show dollars. Let the dollar markets rule behaviour, and watch the doller apes run the earth, down to the very last large species, and watch the average temperature rise up to cook our proteins and dry up our water.
But the dollars themselves are not real. They only represent the relative values to people, by market auction, of what can be extracted from nature and people, at the present time. They are only a means of allocating a distribution between humans of what comes from our shared environment. See how our actions destroy the capacity of nature to renew itself from the energy from our Sun. Each day the future value of dollars is falling so rapidly, that even billionaires must feel they are getting poorer faster than their income rises, and must ask for more tax breaks. As nature dies, dollars become worthless.
Sickening that federal prosecutors stumble and lose cases right and left against corporate thieves responsible for $$ billions-trillions of loses and irreparable damage to mankind and environment but WHOAA let them get a hold of someone causing civil disobedience and they will make an example with maximum penalty. Plays well on Fox to the backward wingnuts.
It is a sad fact of life that it always takes civil disobedience to accomplish meaningful change for the great masses of mankind. Always there is the powerful few who for one reason or another are able to control the lives of the oppressed. Only when the oppression becomes unbearable do we finally take the risks involved in making change.
This gentleman has more courage than most of us. He took the steps to do what he knows to be the best thing for the environment and the life that depends on it. I can only say how much I admire his action and wish that I, and many others had the gumption to do likewise. However, t the rate that we in America are spiraling down into poverty, it won't be long before civil disobedience explodes in the streets of the USA.
One of a dying breed of true heroes.
I just want to spring him the minute he gets in there ...
Clarity may be particularly important here. Dying, we may be, but because of a percieved threat to a psychotic response to insecurity (neocons, conservatives, authoritarians), or because we are dying out as a vital social force?
There need to be thousands of Tim Christophers before things turn around. Until we are all willing to put ourselves on the line for life on this planet, the criminal bankster class will continue to run amok with impunity.
I understand he was to be sentenced today. I read in one of the comments that it was delayed. Am I right? If so, Good! The longer the delay, the better chance he will do no time. Now, he (Tim) needs to become a national speaker (maybe Gore could hire him). Tim is the Van Jones of environmental civil disobedience. He is highly intelligent, well spoken and brave. Our country needs 1- 2-3 many more Tim DeChristophers! Also, at the risk of being labeled sexist, he's quite handsome, to boot. The very best to him and our blessed country.
10 years in prison for lying at an auction as an act of civil disobedience !!??
Outrageous!
What's next? The death penalty for going over the limit on your Visa card?
'What's next? The death penalty for going over the limit on your Visa card?'
Not likely, since they can't continue to pick your pockets with usurious rates if you're dead. Someone's got to pay their bills, and it ain't them.
In the present American justice system, still in the Middle Ages and waiting for democracy to arrive, it is easier to condemn an activist like Tim DeChristopher for 10 years disrupting the natural flow of "time is money" and other corporate dramas adoring an invisible hand, while violent criminals for lack of proof beyond a doubt, walk free or while white collar corporate welfare bum criminals get away with a slap on the hand after playing the economic system and praying on peoples savings or investiments for all their worth. Obviously, bull shit talks while money walks in the land of the free strait to a foreign tax haven.
Tim DeChristopher just sentenced today to 2 years in federal prison (plus $10,000 fine) for throwing the tiniest bit of sand in the well-oiled gears of our corporate/elected stooge system of looting public resources. Truly an example must be made. Imagine 10,000 Tims at every level, throwing in a bit of sand....
This sentence shines a brilliant light on what is now the USA: No consideration of what kind of country/world we want for all the people, of any higher interest than corporate rapacity and greed. Enforced by "Law Enforcement", the "Justice System," and then finally, by the "Supreme Court (including 5 reactionaries blindly rubberstamping whatever the corporations ask for, and more)."
As we work to appeal Tim's egregious sentencing, we can contemplate what the true interests of our present Overlords may be. In the harsh light of this sentencing, it does not appear to be the well-being of us now living in the land of the free.
Tim's real crime: he was not cowed, he did not obey.
Proud, not cowed_____________________________________________
He did not obey. But hey,______________________________________
grains of sand in well oiled gears, _______________________________
once again found their way to the market bears.___________________
Peter, get your guitar and pen!_________________________________
> Peter, get your guitar and pen!
That'll really make a difference, boy howdy.
Let's talk about justice. JUSTICE, remember? These are public lands! What right do these oil companies have to plunder public lands? Is any of this money coming back to public coffers? Ridiculous question. The American people should be boiling mad!!! But no, we are asking/begging the judge for leniency when he should be warning these oil and gas companies that they might think twice about the consequences of despoiling the land and despoiling the water supply. "A so-called enemy of the people like OBL could not have devised a more stealthily brilliant means to destroy a nation by befouling its water supply than have the oil and gas companies..." These companies are traitors and should be treated as such. And any judge who cannot discern the injustice in sentencing Tim deChristopher while letting the real criminals go is not a judge and should be disbarred. And the oil and gas companies should be stripped of their citizenship and sent packing. Who needs them?
He actually got 2 years!!?? Un-f-ing-believable! The maniac from Oslo can only get, at the most, 30 years! I'm not saying Norway should become like US, but, this blows my mind! I wonder who this judge was. In Utah, anybody's guess. I hope his lawyers appeal....what a country! Are they gonna put him in a Supermax prison? I feel sick to my stomach - of course, with everything else happening in the "home of the insane", why am I surprised?
The judge is Dee Benson, who blocked every defense DeChristopher tried to raise.
I ddon't know what happened to my post, did i forget to push save/ Darn it..
I think the jury convicted these bone head for stupidity.
Working to get changes in the laws is the only way.
do the names Saccho and Venzetti ring a bell?
Will you also be in Washington on Oct. 6 to stand up against this government's continuing disdain of average Americans and their needs?. This "Stop the Machine" protest needs all good people for any hope of real change to happen in this country. It is just a beginning, but begin we must.