With Blind Defendant Sentenced to Life, ‘Jury Trial in Name Only’ Continues in Nevada

By Mark Anderson, The TRUTH HOUND
www.thetruthhound.com Stop the Presses News & Commentary

LAS VEGAS, Nevada—When Gregory Burleson, who’s become blind and is apparently destitute, was sentenced July 26 in the U.S. District Court of Nevada, are we to believe that Judge Gloria Navarro didn’t “get” the sheer incongruence of her decision?

Other than perhaps Burleson himself, who’s now wheelchair-bound and is said to suffer from seizures, few seemed to flinch when he received a 68-year prison sentence along with a $1.5 million fine, imposed on the 53-year-old Arizonan for the “suffering” he supposedly brought upon “fear-ridden” federal agents, and to help offset the costs of mobilizing federal assets, in the spring 2014 “Bundy standoff” in southern Nevada near Bunkerville.

And there was no hint of irony when the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, on the one hand, that “Navarro took into account Burleson’s physical impairment and his alcoholism in reaching her decision” but still sentenced him to a term that “exceeds the sentence requested by defense lawyer Terrence Jackson, who asked for a sentence lower than the mandatory minimum of 57 years.”

Burleson, convicted in April of eight counts, including assault, threats, extortion, obstruction of justice, and multiple gun charges, is one of the six defendants from the first of three trials in what has become a grueling case. He and 49-year-old Todd Engel, a fellow supporter of Cliven Bundy—the Bunkerville rancher emblematic of the ongoing opposition against tyrannical federal land-control—were found guilty of assorted charges, many of them decidedly vague, as the first trial concluded in late April.

The jury was unable to convict the other four, so a mistrial was declared by Navarro.

Engel, who has been representing himself in court, was supposed to have been sentenced on July 27. But that sentencing date, at this juncture, has been postponed until Sept. 28.

Meanwhile, the overall trial has become little more than a pre-conviction “pulpit of punishment” for the defendants in the courtroom, as the government callously and needlessly re-tries the other four defendants from the first trial rather than accepting some defeat and moving on.

Consequently, the second, highly anticipated trial involving Cliven Bundy himself, his sons Ammon and Ryan, Ryan Payne and Internet radio host Pete Santilli is once again delayed, raising serious habeas corpus concerns regarding indefinite detention without a fair and speedy trial. Of course, that also extends to the six defendants in the third and final trial: Mel and Dave Bundy (also Cliven’s sons), Brian Cavalier, Jason Woods, Micah McGuire and Joseph O’Shaughnessy.

Roger Roots, the author and legal expert who has barely missed a day of these court proceedings, had dire news to report Aug. 2 after observing several days of the retrial of Scott Drexler, Eric Parker, Richard Lovelien and Steven Stewart.

The trial, one would think, would consist of fair, balanced and open discussion, including about the bizarre and sometimes threatening behavior of Bureau of Land Management agents as they mobilized and camped out in the days leading up to April 12, 2014—the day that Cliven Bundy, his sons and several supporters, some of them armed in an open-carry state, gathered to protest the BLM and its policies, as BLM agents proceeded to try and seize Cliven Bundy’s cattle for his purported non-payment of cattle-grazing fees on federal lands. The agents were unsuccessful.

But Roots instead found that Judge Navarro and the prosecutors appear to be a tag-team that has proscribed the proceedings to tightly confine the defendants’ testimony only to the events of April 12, 2014, the day of the standoff.

However, the prosecution’s witnesses, including BLM agents involved in the affair, can talk about the events in any time frame or manner they wish, to portray themselves as frightened would-be “victims” in the standoff, even though not a single shot was fired in the whole affair. And if there were any injuries, it would have been when Ammon Bundy was tasered or a pregnant woman was forced to the ground, among other assaults reportedly carried out by BLM agents as events transpired.

This apparent rigging of the trial narrative precludes the defense from getting testimony on the record about such shocking behavior of federal agents as April 12 approached, which also included agents setting their laser gun-sights on bystanders as well as on the protestors who showed up to back the elder Bundy against BLM land policies—a foundational issue to this whole saga.

Thus, as of late, anytime a witness has testified on anything about the behavior of federal agents, the federal attorneys simply bellow “objection” and the judge sustains it, even while agents can tell their sob stories on the stand. If the defendants take the stand, they’ll receive sufficient latitude to testify—but at the risk of giving up their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, Roots observed.

Meanwhile, Brianna Bundy, wife of defendant Mel Bundy (one of Cliven’s sons), recalled during a recent interview on KSDZ-FM in Western Nebraska that:

• Leading up to April 12, federal agents prevented alternative media from getting their message out and limited the news narrative mainly or totally to FOX News;
• Agents pointed their guns at alternative journalists;
• The court has been vilifying Eric Parker for numerous things he’s ever read or written on Facebook, including his views on the Oklahoma City Bombing, among other things totally unrelated to the Nevada affair—to paint him as a “troublemaker”;
• Judge Navarro will not let defendants (or anyone else) carry a pocket Constitution within eye-shot of the jury;
• Pictures of BLM agents sometimes pointing their guns at the public are not being shown to the jury (with courtroom videos edited to blot out or skip over such images); and
• The government is estimated to have spent $100 million on this case so far, although, according to Mrs. Bundy, the Department of Justice under Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions has been contacted but has been largely silent.

So, as the prosecution rests in the retrial of the four above-noted defendants—and as the defense gets its turn—a key question is: How long can the government legally re-try the same four defendants? This question comes amid tentative, unsettling indications that if the government fails to convict the four, it may re-try them a third time.

Mrs. Bundy noted there will be no trial date for the second group (Cliven, etc.) until a verdict is someday read on these remaining four. There would be at least 30 days between the verdict and pretrial hearings for the second group. Meanwhile, the jailed men, behind bars for well over a year at this point, reportedly are in good spirits overall, despite gravely missing their wives, children and other family and friends. They've never been offered a chance to get out of jail on bond to work on their defense and see their families, with the court refusing to recognize that the loyal family ties of these men makes a "flight risk" highly unlikely.

And if the judge and prosecution maintain their apparent “tag team” approach, the jury has been, or will be, reduced to a group of mere observers—denied seeing and hearing the full story.

“Could we call it a ‘jury trial in name only’,” this writer queried. To which Roots replied, “That describes it perfectly.”