A homeless man convicted of trashing a Colorado national forest with more than four tons of garbage was sentenced earlier this week to prison.
Benjamin Yoho, 41, was given a six-month sentence behind bars after a judge found him guilty of littering a large area of Uncompahgre National Forest north of Telluride, Fox 31 Denver reports.
“This was no ordinary case of littering in the National Forest — this was full-scale trashing of the public lands and merited a term of incarceration,” Colorado U.S. Attorney John Walsh said.
Prosecutors told the judge Yoho built an illegal home and dumped 8,500 pounds of garbage in the forest from October, 2014, to April.
The litter included recycled items from the Telluride “Free Box,” the station reported.
In May 48 volunteers and crews from the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control removed the debris from the forest by helicopter, according to Fox 31.
The sentence includes one year of probation after Yoho gets out of prison.
San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters said the sentence should serve as a warning to all that trashing the forest is unacceptable behavior.
“Unfortunately, the defendant in this case took advantage of the charitable nature of the Telluride community and made a mockery of it,” he said.
He has every right to be on his/public land. Should this have come before 12 piers in common law and resolved if someone took issue with the trash?
Again, they are keeping us off the land.
He’s got a roof over his head for the next 6 mos…taxpayer funded no less.
He has every right to be on public land, but he shouldn’t be trashing it like it’s his own private property. I think it would have been better to make him clean the trash up instead of throwing him in jail. Now taxpayers have to feed and house him.
Agreed!
That’s exactly what I was thinking: having him pick up the trash would have been better than sending him to prison.
I agree as well. He should have built an “illegal” shed!
Based entirely on speculation, I believe there may be mental issues here. 8,500 lbs. of garbage in 7 months? That folks, is a full time job. Something just doesn’t sit right with this story. In all probability, Mr. Yoho had a court appointed attorney representing him. They generally are as useless as a congressmen or senator. So, the mental issue would never get addressed. But, I suppose 6 months in jail beats being “disappeared”.
Money is made by sending people to prison.
The State pays the stockholders of the private prison system and the judge is heavily invested in penal bonds. The courts do not care about the litter.
And I thought tweakers were bad.
The insanity and psychopathy of the system is
laid bare by the very act of putting people in cages for
‘offenses’ that do not cause another person harm.
-flek
For half of what it costs to keep him in a cage, the government could give him a job cleaning up litter and trash.