The last days of the Bundy trial were no longer about the protest between the ranchers and BLM over grazing rights. The courts attention was drawn to how the prosecution and the agency’s they represented have disregarded the Constitutional rights of the accused.
On December 20th, 2017, Judge Navarro presided over a hearing for the USA v Cliven Bundy trial to give her decision on the defense’s motions for dismissal due to prosecutorial misconduct. The prosecutors committed Brady violations when they failed to turn over evidence favorable to the defense.
Judge Navarro spent nearly two hours detailing six Brady violations made by the prosecution team. The team is comprised of Acting U.S. Attorney, Steven Myhre, and Assistant U.S. Attorneys, Daniel Schiess and Nadia Ahmed. Myhre had been a federal prosecutor for more than 25 years. Navarro said the evidence withheld was “material” to the defense case and that each of the prosecution’s six “willful” violations resulted in due process violations.
One prosecution violation was in regard to the surveillance camera or cameras that captured images, and possibly audio, of the Bundy home, and at other times, surveillance of two other locations. The defense had repeatedly asked for any documentation regarding the surveillance, but the prosecution denied the existence of these camera’s until a government witness, U.S. Park Service Chief Investigator, Mary Hinson, testified to their existence.
Another violation was about the existence of snipers positioned around the Bundy home. The defense needed the FBI reports on these snipers to rebut the governments charges that claimed the Bundy’s and Ryan Payne made false claims that snipers were surrounding the Bundy home.
These FBI reports on snipers were denied and suppressed. The records now show there were at least 197 paramilitary personnel at the Bundy Ranch in April 2014. There were pictures of snippers [sic] on the high ground near the ranch. The paramilitary personnel were from the Las Angeles SWAT, The Las Vegas Metro SWAT and the FBI Hostage Rescue Team along with the BLM law enforcement and their ‘contract cowboys’....
The procedure to be followed now is for lawyers for the defense and the prosecution to file briefs explaining to Judge Navarro how they think the trial should be concluded. The prosecution would normally try to convince the judge that the case should be retried. The defense wants the judge to dismiss the case with prejudice; meaning all charges would be dropped and the prosecution would be barred from trying the case again. December 29th is the deadline for the lawyers to file their arguments regarding how the trial should end. Navarro has set the date for her decision as January 8th, 2018 at the courthouse....
After the courtroom was adjourned, the defendants were able to visit with the jurors. Ammon said all the jurors he talked to were friendly and some wished to visit the ranch. Some jurors said that if they had gone into deliberation at that point, the verdict would have been ‘not guilty’, one saying that he could see what the government was doing to them. The Bundy’s, their defense team, supporters and even a few jurors met outside the courthouse main entrance. The jurors had been impressed by Ryan Bundy’s representation of himself, one of the jurors calling it ‘awesome’.
Bret Whipple, the attorney for Ammon Bundy said; “All we need to do is point out her findings that the evidence was ‘material,’ and the violations were ‘willful,’ and attach the Chapman case. In my mind that seals the deal…I’m confident we’ll get a mistrial with prejudice. One step at a time. We’re getting close.” The Chapman case, like the Bundy case, was headed by Steven Myhre and ended in a mistrial due to the prosecutions failure to disclose exculpatory evidence.
Also not covered is another violation in regards to testimony given by Mary Jo Rugwell regarding the Bundy’s water rights. It seems Rugwell has perjured herself when she testified that she knew nothing about the Bundy’s water rights, but evidence was found that she had previously tried to have those water rights cancelled.
Defense lawyers said the violations in this Bundy trial are more extensive, involving thousands of pages of documents deliberately withheld.
At a roundtable discussion later in the day of the hearing, Ammon Bundy described how the prosecution of the Hammond family in Oregon paralleled the Bundy case in Nevada. Ammon said the Hammonds did not have the benefit of a good defense team, so they are in prison. He continued by saying that we need to act to get the Hammonds out of prison now.
Cliven Bundy is still ‘resisting release’ by not accepting an ankle bracelet monitoring device and a halfway house as a condition of release, and he is also insisting that all the men that came to his ranch in his defense be freed before him.
This article is offered to all other media under the Creative Commons License, when proper credit is given to Terry Noonkester, The Roseburg Beacon and Redoubt News.