The more I read about the case of Dwight and Steven Hammond, the more convinced I am that their prison sentences are a gross miscarriage of justice. After conducting prescribed fires on their own land that crossed onto a few acres of federal grasslands, they were convicted of arson on federal lands, which under a 1996 anti-terrorism law carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.
The law says, “Whoever maliciously damages or destroys . . . by means of fire or an explosive, any . . . real property in whole or in part owned or possessed by, or leased to, the United States . . . shall be imprisoned for not less than 5 years.” The key word is “maliciously”: there is nothing malicious about starting a prescribed fire, something that is regularly practiced by thousands of landowners as well as the government itself.
In its opinion on the case, the Ninth Circuit concluded that a 2001 fire (which the Hammonds started on their own land but which escaped to federal land) was malicious because Dwight Hammond’s grandson and Steven’s nephew, who was a 13 years old in 2001, “testified that Steven had instructed him to drop lit matches on the ground so as to ‘light up the whole country on fire.'” This betrays a divide between urban and rural cultures. To urbanites such as the judges on the Ninth Circuit, “the whole country” means the entire United States.
