Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

6 Comments

  • This is the first I have heard of this. A short summary, for those of us who can’t watch videos at work, can be found here:

    http://www.nacdl.org/public.nsf/whitecollar/overcriminalization_of_conduct/$FILE/Unser.pdf (pdf)

    • By E-Bell

  • Here is an interview with Unser from 1997, not long after the incident:

    http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1997/06/06/news

    Some interesting tidbits:

    Interviewer: You’ve long been at loggerheads with the Forest Service, especially over the Wilderness Protection Act, and some have suggested you staged your disappearance as a protest.

    This makes it sound like the Forest Service could have been retaliating for Unser’s position on the Wilderness Protection Act.

    Unser: The male agent looks me straight in the eye and says: “Bobby, the Sierra Club got a hold of Washington, D.C., and ordered us to give you a ticket if we found your snowmobile in the wilderness.”

    Or maybe the Sierra Club was retaliating.

    Either way, it’s disturbing.

    • By E-Bell

  • Tyranny pure and simple.

    • By Robin

  • Ordeal? He broke the law and his punishment was…? an Ordeal?
    He should have moved for a jury trial in Bama.

  • I have heard that if you are in the US for 15 minutes, you likely have broken at least one law. I know several Europeans and they feel that our country is broken and tyrannical. I feel that something has to change in a dramatic manner, if not, we are facing another Civil War.

    • By david

  • Considering our government’s huge debt, I can think of far better uses of our tax dollars. Did the judge who found him guilty despite a lack of evidence forget about “reasonable doubt” and “innocent until proven guilty”?