The controversy here originates with the decision to jail a pair of ranchers in southeastern Oregon under a law created to combat terrorism, in what the ranchers say amounts to punishment for their good-faith efforts to manage land in collaboration with the government.
Dwight Hammond Jr., 73, and his 46-year-old son, Steven, are due to report to federal prison on Monday to serve five-year prison terms. The men were convicted by a jury of their peers in 2012 on arson charges stemming from a pair of fires the two admit to setting on their land in 2001 and 2006. But the ranchers and their prosecutors tell two very different stories about those fires.
The Hammonds’ property, which has belonged to the ranching family for generations, interlocks with publicly owned Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property, requiring the Hammonds to work together with the BLM to manage the vast area where the Hammonds’ animals graze on a mix of private and federal property.
The Hammonds set a fire in 2001 that ultimately burned 139 acres of BLM land. The ranchers say they began it on their own land with agency approval,
but prosecutors say they were in fact seeking to cover up illegal deer hunting on the BLM acreage near their property. A second, much smaller fire in 2006 burned another acre of BLM land during a “burn ban” imposed to allow agency firefighters to combat a blaze caused by lightning.
The Hammonds served time for the fires in 2013. A district judge sentenced Dwight to three months and Steve to 366 days of prison time. But the federal anti-terrorism law that prosecutors used to punish the fires includes mandatory minimum sentences of 5 years for fires that damage public property but cause no injury or death. After a series of appeals, the Hammonds were re-sentenced in October of 2015 to the full five years required by that 1990s statute.
It’s this re-sentencing that prompted ranchers and militiamen from around the western U.S. to descend on Burns and protest the Hammonds’ treatment by prosecutors. A much smaller group of those protesters has since splintered off to seek an open conflict with federal agents by taking over a nearby wildlife facility.
