Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/tag/green-gavel/)
Green Gavel is an occasional series of stories about court decisions affecting the Great Lakes environment.
By Eric Freedman
The Michigan Court of Appeals has cleared the city of South Haven of liability in the 2020 drowning of an 18-year-old swimmer at a public beach on the Lake Michigan coast.
Two Pennsylvania farmers have been found guilty of poisoning over two dozen migratory birds with a restricted substance.
Many species of birds are declining in North America and many are at risk of extinction, Macdonald said.
A federal grand jury has accused a man of smuggling three Burmese pythons from Canada into the United States. The man faces up to 20 years in prison and a maximum $250,000 fine if convicted.
An Ottawa County, Michigan, electroplating company and two of its top officers have pleaded guilty to violating the federal Clean Water Act by discharging wastewater with excessive amounts of zinc.
A federal grand jury has indicted a Minnesota farmer for allegedly cheating buyers of more than $46 million by falsely labeling non-GMO soybeans and corn as organic.
A federal judge has placed the ex-president of a Fort Wayne environmental services company – described in her lawyer’s sentencing memorandum as “kind, generous, hard-working and honest” and a “huge source of inspiration” for her children and grandchildren” – on probation for two years for illegally storing hazardous wastes and falsifying a document.
An Ohio man who admitted fatally shooting a bald eagle will be banned from hunting for five years and has agreed to pay $20,000 as part of his sentence. Half the money will go to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit funder of conservation projects, as restitution. The other $10,000 is a fine.
A northern Wisconsin logger faces possible time behind bars on charges he illegally cut timber in an environmentally sensitive part of the 1.5 million-acre Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. A federal grand jury in Madison has indicted 40-year-old Jerod Hecimovich on charges of stealing, injuring, cutting and removing live oak timber from an 88-acre parcel of national forestland in Bayfield County.
“Glenn’s Island” in the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh was formed of sludge illegally discharged from the nearby Aspinwall Drinking Water Plant. And some plant employees nicknamed it for retired supervisor Glenn Lijewski, who is awaiting sentencing for conspiracy to violate the Clean Water Act.
By Eric Freedman
A federal judge has sentenced a Flint, Michigan, polluter to one year behind bars for illegally discharging more than 47 million gallons of untreated waste into the city’s sewer system. Robert Massey, the 70-year-old president and owner of family-owned Oil Chem Inc., pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Water Act over an 8½ year period between 2007 and 2015. “That amounts to over 72 Olympic-size swimming pools. The crime was driven by greed. Oil Chem received over a million dollars to dispose of the (material),” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in its sentencing memorandum to U.S. District Judge Stephanie Davis.