Protester Says He Didn’t Plan Lease Bids
Djamila Grossman for The New York Times
Supporters of Tim DeChristopher, foreground, carried signs Wednesday bearing the number 70, his bidder's number during a 2008 lease auction.
By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: March 2, 2011
SALT LAKE CITY — An environmental protester charged with fraudulently buying federal oil and gas leases at an auction here in 2008 took the witness stand at his criminal trial on Wednesday and told the jury he had acted spontaneously, with no clear plan or intent to harm.
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No ‘Choice of Evils’ Defense in Oil Lease Case, Judge Rules (November 17, 2009)
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“My intent when I got in there was to wave a red flag,” said the defendant, Tim DeChristopher, 29, who faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of making false statements and disrupting a federal auction. Only as the auction proceeded, he told the jury, and after seeing a friend weeping in the back of the room in anguish about the event, did things escalate to the point of actually bidding to win more than $1.7 million in public land leases. “At that point, I decided I had to do more,” he said.
Mr. DeChristopher’s trial, which is scheduled to go to the jury Thursday, has attracted a crowd of supporters outside the federal courthouse here in downtown Salt Lake, often singing folk songs and dancing with signs that say, “We are all bidder No. 70,” referring to the bidder’s card Mr. DeChristopher was issued for the auction.
Inside the courtroom, a debate has raged — mostly out of the jury’s presence — about the passions that were swirling among environmentalists in the closing weeks of President George W. Bush’s administration in December 2008 when the leases came up, and how much the jurors can hear about that context in considering Mr. DeChristopher’s motivations and state of mind.
The judge in the case, Dee Benson of Federal District Court, has repeatedly refused — and did so again on Wednesday — an argument by the defense that Mr. DeChristopher felt obligated to act because of a conviction that the Bush administration was itself behaving illegally in issuing the leases in sensitive environmental areas of southern Utah.
That has left the trial, which began on Monday, focused on Mr. DeChristopher’s head on the auction day and offering jurors only veiled hints about the broader political motivations.
Federal prosecutors have portrayed him as a deliberate saboteur, consciously bent on derailing the auction — an open-and-shut federal offense. His lawyers have said he was earnest and passionate and acted without really understanding all the forms he had signed to come in as a bidder.
Mr. DeChristopher, a soft-spoken economics graduate from the University of Utah, told the eight men and four women of the jury that he had gone inside the auction room, instead of joining protest marchers outside, because he knew he could have more impact inside in making some statement. But he stressed that he was not at all sure what form that protest would take even as he went in.
His overarching goal, he told the jurors in one of the brief but cryptic political references allowed by the judge, was to delay the leases so that they could be “reconsidered.” Mr. DeChristopher has said in numerous interviews that he hoped the Obama administration, which was just about to take office the following month, would rethink the auctions.
“I wanted to delay the auction long enough that the government could take a second look,” he told the jurors.
In his cross-examination, an assistant United State attorney, Scott B. Romney, suggested to the jury that the notion of vague plans somehow getting out of hand was contradicted by numerous interviews after the auction in which Mr. DeChristopher defended his actions and talked about his willingness to pay a criminal penalty if need be.
“I knew there would be consequences and knew them to be criminal consequences,” Mr. DeChristopher said in response to questions about what he understood, on the afternoon of the auction, might happen to him if prosecuted.
“You were simply bidding to harm others?” Mr. Romney asked.
“No,” Mr. DeChristopher said.
One of Mr. DeChristopher’s lawyers, Ronald J. Yengich, who pointedly told the jury he had taken the case for no pay, prompted his client with a leading question the other way.
“Is it fair to say the whole thing was a spur of the moment idea?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mr. DeChristopher said.
Mr. DeChristopher’s trial, which is scheduled to go to the jury Thursday, has attracted a crowd of supporters outside the federal courthouse here in downtown Salt Lake, often singing folk songs and dancing with signs that say, “We are all bidder No. 70,” referring to the bidder’s card Mr. DeChristopher was issued for the auction.
Inside the courtroom, a debate has raged — mostly out of the jury’s presence — about the passions that were swirling among environmentalists in the closing weeks of President George W. Bush’s administration in December 2008 when the leases came up, and how much the jurors can hear about that context in considering Mr. DeChristopher’s motivations and state of mind.
The judge in the case, Dee Benson of Federal District Court, has repeatedly refused — and did so again on Wednesday — an argument by the defense that Mr. DeChristopher felt obligated to act because of a conviction that the Bush administration was itself behaving illegally in issuing the leases in sensitive environmental areas of southern Utah.
That has left the trial, which began on Monday, focused on Mr. DeChristopher’s head on the auction day and offering jurors only veiled hints about the broader political motivations.
Federal prosecutors have portrayed him as a deliberate saboteur, consciously bent on derailing the auction — an open-and-shut federal offense. His lawyers have said he was earnest and passionate and acted without really understanding all the forms he had signed to come in as a bidder.
Mr. DeChristopher, a soft-spoken economics graduate from the University of Utah, told the eight men and four women of the jury that he had gone inside the auction room, instead of joining protest marchers outside, because he knew he could have more impact inside in making some statement. But he stressed that he was not at all sure what form that protest would take even as he went in.
His overarching goal, he told the jurors in one of the brief but cryptic political references allowed by the judge, was to delay the leases so that they could be “reconsidered.” Mr. DeChristopher has said in numerous interviews that he hoped the Obama administration, which was just about to take office the following month, would rethink the auctions.
“I wanted to delay the auction long enough that the government could take a second look,” he told the jurors.
In his cross-examination, an assistant United State attorney, Scott B. Romney, suggested to the jury that the notion of vague plans somehow getting out of hand was contradicted by numerous interviews after the auction in which Mr. DeChristopher defended his actions and talked about his willingness to pay a criminal penalty if need be.
“I knew there would be consequences and knew them to be criminal consequences,” Mr. DeChristopher said in response to questions about what he understood, on the afternoon of the auction, might happen to him if prosecuted.
“You were simply bidding to harm others?” Mr. Romney asked.
“No,” Mr. DeChristopher said.
One of Mr. DeChristopher’s lawyers, Ronald J. Yengich, who pointedly told the jury he had taken the case for no pay, prompted his client with a leading question the other way.
“Is it fair to say the whole thing was a spur of the moment idea?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mr. DeChristopher said.
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