Cliven Bundy to walk free as federal judge dismisses Bundy Ranch standoff case

AZ Central – by Robert Anglen

LAS VEGAS — Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, his two sons and a militia member will not face a retrial on charges that they led an armed rebellion against federal agents in 2014.

A federal judge on Monday said the federal prosecutors’ conduct was “outrageous” and “violated due process rights” of the defendants.

U.S. District Court Judge Gloria Navarro dismissed the charges against the four men “with prejudice,” meaning they cannot face trial again. She said a new trial would not be sufficient to address the problems in the case and would provide the prosecution with an unfair advantage going forward.  

As the courtroom doors opened after Navarro’s ruling, a huge cheer went up from the crowd of spectators gathered outside.

Navarro’s decision comes less than a month after she declared a mistrial in case and found federal prosecutors willfully withheld critical and “potentially exculpatory” evidence from the defense.

Cliven Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan Bundy, and militia member Ryan Payne were all in court. Cliven Bundy had remained in jail until the hearing; the judge ordered his immediate release.

Navarro on Dec. 20 cited six pieces of evidence the Nevada U.S. Attorney’s Office failed to disclose that was favorable to the defense and could have changed the outcome of the trial.

The evidence included:

• Records about surveillance at the Bundy ranch;
• Maps about government surveillance;
• Records about the presence of government snipers;
• FBI logs about activity at the ranch in the days leading up to standoff;
• Law-enforcement assessments dating to 2012 that found the Bundys posed no threat;
• Internal affairs reports about misconduct by Bureau of Land Management agents.

“Failure to turn over such evidence violates due process,” Navarro said last month. “A fair trial at this point is impossible.”

Prosecutors urge judge for retrial

Former Acting Nevada U.S. Attorney Steven Myhre, who led the prosecution, had urged the judge in a Dec. 29 motion to allow his office to retry the case.

Prosecutors said Bundy conspired with militia groups and anti-government protesters to block a lawful round-up of his cattle from public lands. He said defendants had wrongly tried to turn the case into a civil rights issue and improperly tried to allege they acted in self defense.

Myhre said his office did not intentionally violate so-called Brady rules about turning over evidence. He said the failure to turn over evidence was inadvertent and did not represent “flagrant government misconduct.”

The motion was the first time Myhre publicly addressed the judge’s findings about suppressed evidence.

“The government’s belated disclosure of these materials is not so grossly shocking or outrageous as to violate the universal sense of justice,” he wrote.

He said prosecutors genuinely did not believe they had to turn over evidence based on previous court rulings. He also said some documents were accidentally overlooked among the hundreds of thousands of pages prosecutors turned over to defense lawyers.

Defense lawyers had sought to have the case dismissed and their clients freed from the chance of being tried again.

They said recently revealed documents provided critical evidence that would have allowed them to challenge the government’s charges, impeach government witnesses and lay the foundation for self-defense claims.

They said a retrial would have given the government an unfair advantage, allowing them to build arguments based on defense strategies that were laid out in the first trial.

Defense lawyers maintained prosecutors acted recklessly and got caught. They said Myhre’s admission that he violated court rules “should be viewed as too little and too late.”

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investigations/2018/01/08/cliven-bundy-ranch-standoff-case-retried-federal-court-ruling/1008051001/