Salt Lake Tribune: Cliven Bundy may be a free man, but he is also a cheat and a thief

Pretty strong words from the Salt Lake Tribune.

And well deserved words as well.

As a Western stockman, I detest Bundy's actions.  Sooner or later somebody from outside this region is going to say something like "well, he really stuck it to the Feds, eh?".  Well, the Feds treated him with kit gloves and this disaster only makes the moronic "take the land back" movement that much stronger by default.

The blame for this idiocy here goes straight to the Federal Prosecutors who withheld evidence.  They're not supposed to do that, and now the public has paid the price.

Unlike civil procedure, in criminal procedure the prosecution doesn't have to turn over everything that might be asked for.  Rather, it only has to turn over "exculpatory evidence".  The problem is that what consists of "exculpatory evidence" is basically left up to the prosecutors. Defense lawyers will be lucky if they ever learn of it even existing, should it be withheld.  Well, here's what happened here:

But on Monday, a federal judge — who had declared a mistrial last month — tossed out the case against craven Cliven and his band of dimwits, citing blatant misconduct by the federal prosecutors, specifically the failure to turn over 3,000 pages of material to the defense team.

“The court finds that the universal sense of justice has been violated,” U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro said of what she characterized as “flagrant misconduct.”

The prosecutors basically argued they weren’t nefarious, just stupid, and the documents wouldn’t have affected the case against the Bundys. The evidence included video taken by an informant inside the ranch during the standoff and evidence the FBI took part in the incident.

So the Feds really blew it.

Somebody ought to be getting fired.

Somebody ought to also look at the peculiar demographic element of this movement.  Bundy was a rancher in Nevada, but this article ran in Salt Lake. That's not a mere coincidence.,  This movement is strongest in Utah and I think there's an historical reason for that which has almost nothing to do with other Western states, but which laps into them for demographic reasons.  I've been pondering that due to this coming up in the early Wyoming gubernatorial race, and falling down dead in Colorado last year.  I may post more on that later.