Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Justice for state workers

Thursday, June 17, 1999 | 9:46 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

THE NEVADA SUPREME Court last week sent a strong message to Elko District Court Judge J. Michael Memeo, District Attorney Gary D. Woodbury and several local people who served on a grand jury for that county. The message tells them that the laws of Nevada have to be followed even in that most northeastern section of the Silver State. The Supreme Court goes on to remind them that state employees are also citizens and can't be beaten up on just because local residents don't like the law they are enforcing.

I started writing about this grand jury more than three years ago when it became obvious it was impaneled to punish both state and federal conservation agency employees. It was impaneled in February 1996 after an Elko businessman wrote a letter a year earlier to the county commissioners. That letter was an instrument sharpened to destroy any efforts these agencies made to protect the environment. The guts of the letter said, "It is becoming increasingly obvious that these relationships go far beyond the accepted, they in fact may well represent a conspiracy, a conspiracy involving those within the environmental movement and those employees within the various resource management bureaucracies. This conspiracy has, and continues to, economically impact the ranching and mining community of Elko County, the business community of Elko County and collectively, a ll of its taxpaying citizens." To stop this conspiracy the writer called for a grand jury. So the conspiracy gun was loaded for a grand jury to fire.

Although the district attorney denied that Nevada Department of Wildlife employees Larry Barngrover, Duane Erickson, Kenneth Gray and their boss, Willie Molini, were targets of the grand jury, they all were targets. So Barngrover, Erickson and Gray testified before that body. The issue was $500,000 a mining operation agreed to pay the state before starting to mine 5,500 acres of public land that was prime winter habitat for mule deer. The money was being used by the state to rehabilitate nearby land scarred from range fires. The grand jury wrongly determined that the state employees and U.S. Forest Service employees had somehow conspired to coerce the mining company into an unfair settlement. Overlooked was the fact the mining company hadn't complained about the agreement.

The office of Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa pointed out: "State wildlife agency is authorized by law to participate with federal land management agencies to determine extent of mitigation required for permitted activities which affect habitat on public land; wildlife agency properly obtained legislative approval for acceptance and use of mitigation funds from mining company for development of off-site habitat mitigation; no basis exists to support grand jury determination that officials committed crime of oppression."

The grand jury was told by the district attorney it couldn't indict the public employees because the statute of limitations had run out. By now the U.S. attorney had let the local hanging mob know that the U.S. Forest Service employees had better be dropped from anymore self-serving vindictive legal action. But the mob pressed forward and continued its assault on the state employees and -- against state law -- named them publicly. The targets then filed a motion to expunge the presentment and grand jury report and Judge Memeo denied their motion.

In its discussion the Supreme Court wrote, "This court has generally held that only those portions of the report which violate the provisions of NRS 172.267 are subject to expungement. However, in this case, where the statute was circumvented by the filing of an invalid presentment, total expungement of the 'presentment,' the report of the grand jury and the grand jury transcripts is warranted."

Finally, the good guys won one in this mess created by the minds of a few conspiracy folks who tried to make their own rules and punish people who stood in their way.

When watching this injustice over the years I took a close look at the men the grand jury had targeted. For example there is Duane Erickson, a 30-year career biologist with the Nevada Division of Wildlife, and his wife, who have lived in Elko County for more than 20 years. She teaches math at Elko High School, and they have raised two sons in that community. Last year Erickson told me: "We have never been involved in a single incident of impropriety or illegal actions since we moved to Nevada in 1968. Now to be called government thugs and extortionists by the local press and criminals by our local government has been difficult to understand and sometimes even harder to accept."

More than three years of personal pain and suffering won't go away immediately, but justice was finally rendered by a unanimous Supreme Court. Although the justices didn't include it in their order to the Elko court they should have added "shame, shame on you."