Part Two: Woe to the man who beats federal prosecutors
Examiner Editorial
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January 22, 2009
When federal agents first interviewed Krister Evertson about his shipping sodium he had sold on E-Bay via UPS, he described his fuel cell experiments back home in Idaho in great detail.
Federal authorities in Alaska sent word to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Idaho, which promptly dispatched its agents to the industrial supply facility in Salmon where Evertson had stored his fuel cell materials.
The EPA agents treated the materials like a Superfund site. They cut open his steel drums, cleared away a perimeter – and, by their own account, spent some $430,000 disposing of every bit of Evertson’s painstakingly assembled experiments.
“They never told me; they just went and did it,” Evertson told The Washington Examiner in a telephone interview from his Oregon prison.
“It’s like Chicken Little: They run around like the sky is falling…. It’s like the perfect storm of misunderstanding and unfounded fear and they never asked me about it. I could have told them in one minute exactly what to do with it,” he said.
Despite his acquittal in Alaska, federal authorities filed new charges against Evertson in Idaho for allegedly illegally transporting his materials the half mile from his home to the storage facility and improperly disposing of “hazardous” waste, all based on strained readings of EPA regulations.
Evertson claimed he had stored the materials properly and they were perfectly secure.
“My expert witness said the stainless steel container could safely contain the intermediate process stream indefinitely, that means forever. The stainless steel was 3/8 of an inch thick. I bought it from the Long Beach, California, Naval Yard. It was completely enclosed…. I could have neutralized all of it for $200,” Evertson said.
Marc Callaghan, a government witness, testified that he tried to speak with Evertson, but claimed that “Mr. Evertson would not speak to me.”
But Callaghan’s assertion seems to conflict with the FBI’s initital description of Evertson as eager to discuss his fuel cell activities. Strangely transcript of Evertson’s second trial shows the judge did not ask prosecutors for elaboration on Callaghan’s assertion.
Never mind that Evertson had clearly saved the material for future use rather than abandoning it. Never mind that it would be potentially dangerous only if taken out of the storage materials Evertson had so carefully constructed.
And never mind, finally, that, in the words of Evertson’s appellate brief, none of the materials were “discharged into the air, land or sea,” and the government failed to produce any evidence “that the defendant intended this to happen.”
Indeed, the brief notes, “the EPA witness, Marc Callaghan, testified that the materials became hazardous waste [only] when the EPA disposed of them.”
Even so, on Oct. 22, 2007, the Idaho jury found Evertson guilty of the illegal disposal charge. He was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison.
Evertson has appealed, claiming the jury was improperly instructed by the trial judge on multiple counts that, if corrected, would have materially changed the jury’s understanding, and thus its verdict.
Evertson’s appeal brief sums up the absurdity of the whole case by quoting from a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in the year 2000: “To say that when something is saved it is thrown away is an extraordinary distortion of the English language.”
Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said prosecutors would have no comment because the case in on appeal. No hearing date has been set. --- Quin Hillyer.
