Morning Bell: Fighting Back Against Arbitrary Government Rule
Conn Carroll /
Abner Schoenwetter had been in the commercial seafood business since 1986. Over the years, Schoenwetter built a successful company distributing seafood across the country, including lobster tails imported from overseas. As far as Schoenwetter knew, all of his business transactions were perfectly legal and he had no reason to believe that he or any of his business partners were breaking any laws. But at 7 a.m. one morning in 1999, armed agents from the FBI, IRS and National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) showed up at his south Florida home with search warrants. The federal agents herded him, his wife, his mother-in-law and his daughter (all still in their night clothes) into the living room where they were told to sit and be quiet. A year later, Schoenwetter was sentenced to eight years in prison, three years of supervised release and fined over $100,000. His crime? Schoenwetter testified to the House Judiciary Committee last week:
No matter how you frame it, the truth is that I am a convicted felon who has just spent the last six years of my life in federal prison for entering into a contract to buy lobsters.
Specifically, the NMFS charged Schoenwetter with violating the Lacey Act, a law that makes it a crime for an American to take wildlife in violation of domestic laws or regulations. The law was intended to punish, for example, an American who killed an elephant in Kenya in violation of Kenyan wildlife protections. So what foreign regulations had Schoenwetter violated? Well, the NMFS claimed that the lobsters he had contracted to buy were in violation of three Honduran regulations: 1) they were in plastic bags, not cardboard boxes; 2) they were undersized; 3) some of them were egg-bearing lobsters. Despite the fact that this specific shipment was no different than any of the hundreds of other deals Schoenwetter had done over the years, despite the fact that Schoenwetter had never seen the lobsters in question and knew nothing of the Honduran regulations, and despite the fact that the Honduran Attorney General confirmed that the size regulation had never actually been signed into law and the Honduran Minister of Justice testified that the egg-bearing regulation was directed at turtles, not lobsters, Schoenwetter’s conviction was upheld. (more…)