Judge tosses charges against rancher over armed standoff
A federal judge in Las Vegas on Monday dismissed charges against Cliven Bundy and his sons who had been accused of leading an armed standoff against federal land managers.
Judge Gloria Navarro of U.S. District Court said the government’s missteps in withholding evidence against the three Bundy family members and a supporter, Ryan Payne, were so grave that the indictment against them would be dismissed.
Navarro declared a mistrial last month in the case, stemming from the standoff at the Bundy ranch in 2014 that had arisen over land-grazing fees. She said then that prosecutors had failed to turn over important evidence to the defense, including video taken surreptitiously within the ranch during the standoff, and evidence that FBI agents were involved in the incident.
Her decision to throw out the case shattered a long government effort to portray the Bundy family members as violent extremists. It also undermined in many ways a core argument by Cliven Bundy, 71, and his sons that the federal government had become an omnipotent force of police power and that opponents to federal land policies would be crushed.
The 2014 standoff began when the Bureau of Land Management seized cattle from Bundy’s ranch in Bunkerville, Nev., in an attempt to force him to pay decades of fees for grazing his cattle on federal land. Bundy insisted he did not have to pay the charges because, he said, he had inherited water rights on the land. At the height of the standoff, hundreds of antigovernment activists, many of them carrying guns, rallied to the Bundys’ cause, until the confrontation ended with the withdrawal of federal agents.
In the years since, the family became even more firmly entrenched in the deep and bitter debate over public land policy in the West — seen either as rightwing extremists or stalwarts in standing up against federal government overreach.
Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five of their followers were acquitted by a federal jury in October 2016 on all charges related to their takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon earlier that year. Last August, another federal jury, in Nevada, declined to convict four other men who were involved in the Bundy ranch standoff. And earlier this year a jury in Oregon split on charges against four men in the Malheur takeover — convicting two of conspiracy charges but acquitting two others.
After Navarro’s ruling in December that prosecutors had withheld evidence in the ranch standoff that might have helped the defendants, prosecutors said in their court filings that fears of violence against witnesses were part of their decision-making in what evidence to release.