Speaker Tells Ranchers
Government Is Lawless

DURANGO, Colo. —(AP)— The author who wrote ``War on the West'' says ranchers and farmers have reason to distrust what their government tells them.

William Perry Pendley, president of the Denver-based Mountain States Legal Foundation, told La Plata County Farm Bureau members the government uses "tricky lawyerlike language to hide what it's doing," and then won't be bound.

The foundation's lawsuits in recent years have included John Schuler's case over his self-defense killing of a grizzly and Bobby Unser's snowmobile excursion near Chama, N.M.

Schuler prevailed after eight years of litigation, and he didn't have to pay the $5000 fine for killing the bear in his yard, Pendley said, although it took the foundation $250,000 to defend him. Recovery of legal fees has yet to be sorted out.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver has yet to rule on Unser's appeal of his $75 fine after a lower court defeat, which Pendley called the foundation's biggest disappointment of last year.

Unser was snowmobiling on a nice day when a storm blew in, Pendley said. He got lost, nearly died and walked many hours in waist-deep snow to a phone. Later he asked the Forest Service for help in finding his snowmobile. Instead, he was ticketed for using a motorized vehicle in wilderness.

"Bobby Unser didn't have the criminal intent to commit the crime," Pendley said, but the government ... "held wilderness so sacrosanct that it can't deal with such technicalities as intent."

Pendley also noted President Clinton's 1996 designation of 1.7 million acres of Utah land as wilderness, the Escalante Grand Staircase.

"It killed a trillion-dollar coal mine," Pendley said.

Mountain States Legal Foundation sued, and after two year of government foot-dragging, Pendley said, not one document has been disclosed.

"(The government) said: 'We don't have any documents. We don't know anything.' This is what happens when you have a lawless president," Pendley said.