Posted on 06/29/2007 6:23:42 PM PDT by george76
The 73-year-old man who strung heavy cables across a trail on the San Francisco Peaks that clotheslined a motorcyclist won't be going to jail.
J.D. Protiva will receive supervised probation for one year after pleading guilty to three counts of felony endangerment in a case in which a motorcyclist hit one of the cables and was thrown from his bike in September. He was also banned from the Coconino National Forest.
Protiva was sentenced Tuesday after telling a Coconino County Superior Court judge he had gone too far in a frustrating attempt to ban motorcycles and protect nesting sites for Mexican spotted owls.
"I am totally ashamed of my cowardly action," Protiva told Judge Dan Slayton.
He described letters to the Arizona Daily Sun that went unpublished, requests to the Coconino National Forest that went unfulfilled and signs he posted prohibiting motorcycles that were quickly taken down.
Eventually, he became fed up, deciding no one was willing to help him protect the owls' nest sites.
Judge Slayton seemed to side with Protiva on the question of whether motorcyclists could legally use the Challenger Trail ringing the base of the San Francisco Peaks. But he said Protiva also could have injured horse riders or hikers with the cables in an attempt to keep out the motorcyclists.
(Excerpt) Read more at azdailysun.com ...
sentenced for three felony counts of endangerment stemming from Protiva placing heavy cables across a trail used by motorcycles at the base of the San Francisco Peaks last fall...
Are these the undocumented Mexican spotted owls?
Put those same cables across the front driveway to a San Francisco abortion clinic and you’ll spend the rest of your life behind bars.
Different justice system based upon who does the same deed against whom.
These illegals must have gotten amnesty ?
“Judge Slayton seemed to side with Protiva on the question of whether motorcyclists could legally use the Challenger Trail ringing the base of the San Francisco Peaks. But he said Protiva also could have injured horse riders or hikers with the cables in an attempt to keep out the motorcyclists.”
Am I crazy or is this judge trying to rationalize that it was OK for a motorcyclist to be possibly decapitated but this idiots actions could of hurt other park users and therefore it probably wasn’t a good idea?
Amnesty? It’s for the birds!
Seems so.
Ok to kill some but not others ?
lol.
Amnesty? It’s for the birds!
The judge seemed to side with him?
The article never does say whether it’s illegal to ride on the trail but even if it is illegal, trying to kill someone in that manner deserves jail time, even if he is old and sorry.
I guess the probation means he has to wait a year before he puts the cables back up.
I like to hike in the woods. I even know the area where this took place, though I don’t live near there anymore. I am disgusted by all the people who cannot get off of a motorized vehicle, exercise their legs and heart, and enjoy the sound of nature instead of a whining engine. Obviously, many people don’t share my view. They love to ride in on the trails. The geezer took his disgust beyond the law. He should go to jail. The lard asses on motor bikes who could ride anywhere else but insist on riding in the woods will likely suffer clogged arteries, but that’s their choice.
One can only hope the so called judge doesn’t have to suffer the same fate someday.
Apparently it is a legal trail to ride. That is why he was putting up his “personal” closed signs. The USFS must have been removing them too ?
This guy could have killed someone. He was apparently found guilty of three felonies.
My view : the liberal judge gave him a pass because they are ‘fellow travelers.’
Eco-nut protecting each other ?
This guy is is Fruit Loop.
He is no better than a PETA freak who would kill a human to protest the killing of animals.
It kind of sounded that way to me too though it didn’t actually say.
If that is the case, it doesn’t speak well for Judge Dan Slayton. He sounds like he could be an enviro whack job too.
“I am disgusted by all the people who cannot get off of a motorized vehicle...”
I am disgusted by all the people who refuse to use a muffler, who don’t stick to the trails while riding, who tear up trout streams by riding in them, and who erode the trails so that I can’t walk on them.
In other words, I have no problem w/ people having a place to ride (sounds fun to me) but backpackers, horse riders and cyclists need to have their space — and silence — too.
This guy was “saving the owls” not fat riders.
We like to hike in the woods too. We go to non-motorized areas if we want that too.
Putting up personal closed signs on public property is not the answer.
Installing cables at neck height across public trails on public property that could kill someone is really not the answer.
This guy reminds me of :
Vlasak and his wife, the former child actress Pamelyn Ferdin, are both directors of a militant “direct action” Los Angeles group called the Animal Defense League .
” that political assassination “could be used quite effectively from a pragmatic standpoint ... for 5 lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives.”
The liberal ethos; Criminality in their cause is virtuous. At least it is to most judges it seems.
Obviously you don’t ride dirt bikes. I ride them on most weekends. In my 25+ years of riding dirt bikes....I can count the “lard asses” I’ve seen riding dirt bikes on one hand...
You people must have something funny on your drinking water out there...if there are really “lard asses” riding “motor bikes” in the woods. Did some fat wanna-bee motorcycle club members take a wrong turn onto the trail? Inquiring minds want to know.
His problem is his name now out in the public domain. We will have to see if that is going to be good or bad for him.
J.D. Protiva or Judge Dan Slayton ?
His problem is his name now out in the public domain. We will have to see if that is going to be good or bad for him.
Yes, the ones that eat those priceless Mt. Graham red squirrels.
A "lard ass" on a horse I can envision.
Now you horse riders don't take offense. I am not implying you are fat. Just that my experience, a dirt-bike is mighty uncomfortable for a seriously overweight person, but a good horse could be quite nice.
This is the mental illness of the eco-nut, that nature is too precious for non-environmentalists to be allowed to use at all.
Think about the things they really hate: SUVs, ATVs, RVs, cross country motorcycles. Things that the disgusting hoi polloi, the proles, the inferiors, the non-environmentalists use to gain access to nature.
Many have clearly said that ideally, the rest of us should be confined to the cities, not allowed to set foot outside our cages, and optimally, should have our profligate numbers “culled”, so as to not hurt *their* precious environment.
There was even a map put out by the United Nations a few years ago, showing what a “re-natured” United States would look like, with all the people moved to the coasts and not allowed inland, and all traces of habitation removed.
Strangely enough, this attitude has existed for a very, very long time in America and Europe. It began in its earliest incarnation as a rejection of industrialization.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, wrote about the (intentionally) Garden of Eden-like “State of Nature”, and about how free and naturally enlightened the (mythical) primitive peoples who lived there behaved, devoid of any trappings of civilization, especially morality.
Henry David Thoreau was also enamored with how wonderful nature would be if there just wasn’t any civilization, totally ignoring the hypocrisy of returning to his cabin at night when nature was less lovely.
Ralph Waldo Emerson had a far more philosophical approach, one that can still be seen in such environmental fanatics as Edward Abbey. The recurrent theme in their work that mankind should be reduced to living in a few, isolated villages, ruled over by their masters, elites called “Orphic Poets”, with absolute authority. (On the assumption that those who embraced the philosophy would assume that they would be among the masters.)
Ironically, few people know where this line of reasoning leads, but it was best expressed in the antebellum era prior to the US Civil War, by the pro-slavery, pre-Marxist author George Fitzhugh.
“’Cannibals All!, Or Slaves Without Masters’ was a sharp criticism of the system of “wage-slavery” found in the north. Fitzhugh’s ideas were based on his view that the “negro slaves of the South” were considerably more free than those trapped by the oppression of capitalist exploitation.
His idea to rectify social inequality created by capitalism was to institute a system of universal slavery which was based on his belief that “nineteen out of every twenty individuals have...a natural and inalienable right to be slaves.”
Again, with the assumption that the Democrats who agreed with him would be of the elites.
And this philosophy seamlessly integrated into Marxism.
But in their endless efforts of the socialist left to keep the idea fresh, including such insensibles as Rachel Carson “Silent Spring”, Margaret Mead “Coming of Age In Samoa”, and Al Gore, over and over you see the same basic themes:
Nature good. Man bad. Civilization bad. Primitivism good. Elitism good. Man must be forced to behave. Freedom for the masses is bad. We of the elite should rule over you, because, well, we are elite.
Of course, when taken to extremes, you get people like Pol Pot, who Edward Abbey would have liked to have emulated if he could.
The tremendous irony is that so many of these people are avowed atheists, yet what they truly crave above all things is to return to the Garden of Eden. To spit out that piece of apple from the nasty old Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and run around naked and unashamed of their nakedness, like the beasts of the field.
“Am I crazy or is this judge trying to rationalize that it was OK for a
motorcyclist to be possibly decapitated but this idiots actions could of
hurt other park users and therefore it probably wasn’t a good idea?”
That’s the impression I drew from the jurist’s words.
Maybe he’s a graduate of The Animal Farm School of Law.
As in “some animals are more equal than others”.
And motorcyclists are low on the food chain in the judge’s worldview.
I agree with you, riding dirt bikes(read off road motocycles) is not an easy task. Not many "lard asses" riding dirt bikes. Takes a lot of energy to ride on the dirt. I used to ride them when young but no longer , due to age creeping in, but when I did ride it was not with any "lard asses".
Good post. Little long, but well written. :-)
I agree. I don’t care if they ride somewhere, but why does it have to be on a nice hiking trail. Why must they take that awful sound out where others are trying to enjoy tranquility?
It brings a tear to my eye. NOT!
Ping.
Thanks george76.
You don’t like riding motorcycles. Good for you. But your disgust is definately misplaced. I’m disgusted that a judge would give such a light sentence to someone who clearly intended harm to another person who was apparently doing a legal activity (if it were not legal to ride the trail, the paper would have said so).
You choose to view the country by pounding your feet and sweating your way up a trail. I choose to see the country by riding a low-slung two-wheel piece of hardware. I don’t find fault with YOUR choice, you can certainly live with mine. Unless bikers are harming you, give ‘em a break.
I am upset with the judge. In my first comment was the statement that the geezer should go to jail. I can live with a lot of things, even people having flatulence at a funeral. That doesn’t mean I won’t be disgusted. People are free to do a lot of thinks I don’t like. If the subject comes up, I’ll say what I think about it. I wish people who ride dirt bikes wouldn’t be running up and down the mountain side on the small trails causing me and my wife to have to get out of their ways so they can zoom by. I’m not going to do a thing that’d hurt them or that is illegal, but what I think and feel about it is part of my freedom. And to me it’s obnoxious.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.