The news of Dwight and Steven Hammond’s resentencing is an open platform for change in federal handling policies, but the fear incited by Ammon Bundy’s voluntary militia of protesters is clouding evidence that backs claims of federal government mismanagement. Protesters are against the Hammonds’ re sentencing and believe they were convicted unfairly under laws intended for acts of terror for which they’ve been given excessive sentences but are not explicitly calling upon the issue at hand, a reduction of the Hammonds’ sentences.
While much of the news coverage related to the Hammond family has broadcasted Ammon Bundy’s armed militia protest, the legal issue at its core is beginning to come into focus. Bundy and his supporters have set up camp on federal land, demanding that control over the asserted public land be remanded to its local people such as the Hammond ranching family. As the American Bar Assocation Journal suggests, the Hammonds became a cause celebre among anti-government activists in part because of mandatory minimum sentencing regarding disputed use of land with the federal government. Both Dwight and Steven Hammond had served their initially imposed sentences when the government successfully appealed to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Under said appeal, the Hammonds were re-sentenced to the five-year mandatory minimum, re-trying the pair as if they were terrorists though initially sentenced for arson.
While Bundy’s actions are drawing attention to private land conflicts with federal government land rights, they are slowly distracting from the application of said protest: the plight of the Hammonds. At the center of this standoff are a pair of Oregon ranchers who were denied the chance to make their claim to the U.S. Supreme Court. The re-sentencing of the Hammonds turned them quickly from arsonists to terrorists, despite original claims that sentencing the two to the minimum mandatory sentence of five years was acknowledged by a federal district judge as “grossly disproportionate” and a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. A 2014 ruling by a panel of the court acknowledged that the Supreme Court has upheld longer sentences for comparable or less serious crimes. In March of 2015, the Supreme court rejected the Hammonds’ petitions for certiorari.
