400 North 600 West, Blanding, Utah
Jeanne and Jericca Redd of Blanding, Utah, the wife and daughter respectively of James Redd, the physician who committed suicide shortly after being indicted on pothunting charges in June, appeared in federal court in Salt Lake City today for sentencing in their own cases. They pleaded guilty in July, presumably as part of some sort of plea bargain with the authorities, who said at the time that they would not seek the maximum penalty available under the applicable laws.
San Juan Pharmacy, Blanding, Utah
To say the Redds didn’t receive the maximum penalty today would be quite the understatement. While each of the seven counts to which Jeanne Redd pleaded guilty could potentially have resulted in a $250,000 fine and 10 years in prison, she ended up with 36 months of probation and a $2000 fine. Her daughter got a $300 fine and 24 months of probation for the three counts to which she pleaded guilty. Talk about a slap on the wrist.
Abandoned Gas Station, Blanding, Utah
Given the scale of the investigation behind these charges, it seems pretty obvious that there’s more going on here than meets the eye. While as far as I know no one has actually said that the Redds pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain, that seems like the most logical explanation for the authorities’ leniency here, especially given Jeanne Redd’s history of antiquities law violations. I can think of at least two reasons for this strategy:
- To gather evidence for the prosecutions of other suspects. The Redds were clearly very closely tied to a lot of other people involved in these illegal artifact acquisition and trade networks, and they probably have huge amounts of information that would be very useful in the trials of more recalcitrant suspects. The large number of charges against Jeanne Redd in particular, with the huge potential penalties connected to each, would have given prosecutors a lot of leverage over her to get her to cooperate.
- To inspire other suspects to plead guilty in hopes of getting similarly lenient treatment. The really quite remarkably light sentences imply that something like this is probably going on. If even Jeanne Redd, with all the charges against her, can get off with just 36 months probation and a $2000 fine, other suspects with fewer charges in particular may not see much downside to cooperating, compared to the high and increasing risk of conviction at trial and really severe penalties if they remain uncooperative while others are turning on them.
- Perhaps, and this is a bit more speculative, to gather evidence for indictments against others who have not yet been charged. The evidence against the Blanding folks, and the others charged so far, was mostly very straightforward and based on tape-recorded conversations by an undercover operative. The investigation seems to be moving outward, though, toward dealers and, possibly, collectors in other places whose roles in the illicit artifact trade are rather different and harder to tie directly to the initial looting. Getting the looters at the source end to turn on the customers at the recipient end is a smart way to get around the murky and complicated nature of the networks, which (at least partly deliberately) obscures the connections. I emphasize that I don’t have any specific evidence that this is what is going on, but it seems a reasonable guess.
Creative Floors, Blanding, Utah
In any case, the slap on the wrist to the Redds is a very interesting development. While punishments for violations of antiquities laws are often very lenient, which is a big problem for enforcing the laws in general, the high-profile nature of these cases suggests that something more complex is going on in this instance.
Historic Bell, Blanding, Utah
In related news, it seems that Bob Knowlton, an antiquities dealer in Grand Junction, Colorado who was indicted in August on charges of dealing in illegal artifacts, appeared in federal court in Denver on Monday. He was appointed a public defender until he can hire a lawyer, and he will return on September 30 to enter his plea. Knowlton’s case is interesting because while the number of charges is small, the indictment includes detailed information on the origins of the artifacts he sold, given by Knowlton himself and recorded by the undercover operative, including descriptions of the people he bought them from. None of those descriptions seems to match anyone else indicted so far. It’ll be interesting to see how he pleads, especially given today’s events in Salt Lake. Stay tuned.
Shiprock from Blanding, Utah
Thank you for your well written and informative blog! I’m enjoying reading your back posts.
On the Redd sentence, my jaw dropped open at the quote from the Tribune article, “I want to express my thanks,” [U.S. District Judge] Waddoups said to the Redds and their family. “I know this has been a terrible experience for all of you.” It is astonishing in its appearance of clannishness, and its apparent indifference to the sensibilities of the world outside Blanding, Utah.
With full appreciation for the traditions of beloved town doctors who steal from the dead and sell it for money, and with all respect to the cultural narcissism that blames the Feds for asking his family (once again) to kindly quit the wholesale robbery of a nation’s heritage, I wonder if the townsfolk who defend this practice — or who, like Judge Waddoups, praise it with faint damnation — know the difference between cliquish, clannish and cult.
It’s difficult to decide what is the most remarkable aspect of the story: the appalling lack of intellectual honesty from those involved, the tenacity of their greed, or the monumental hypocrisy of their self-justification.
Thanks for stopping by; glad you like the blog.
One thing to note about this is that Waddoups doesn’t have any particular connection to Blanding. He seems to come from Idaho originally, although he went to BYU and the University of Utah law school. The US District Court for Utah is in Salt Lake City, which is where this case was heard. So wherever Waddoups got his attitudes toward pothunting, it wasn’t Blanding. Instead it just seems to be part of the widespread perception in the west that it’s not a big deal. Note too that Waddoups was appointed by Bush, so it’s not that implausible to think that his opinions on things like the BLM’s handling of these cases are not very government-friendly.
> “Instead it just seems to be part of the widespread perception in the west that it’s not a big deal.” <
An interesting point. Although I am hesitant to slap the Bandits of Blanding with the label of determinism (as Waddoups says, they've suffered enough), my sense from living on the western edge of the Great Basin is that the social dynamic of this incident, and the pothunting tradition of which it is part, are themselves expressions of a centuries-old tradition of opportunistic exploitation of the land's natural and (non-White) cultural resources. The self-serving rationalizations of the players in the Redd affair reek of personal entitlement and cultural narcissism.
Interesting, too, the comments from readers of the Tribune article. One pointed out that the reaction of Blanding residents and the sentence from Judge Waddoups would have been very different had it been a family of Native Americans looting White cemeteries.
Absolutely. Everything about this case, from the initial looting to the outraged reactions to the arrests and the lenient sentences, stems from that sense of entitlement, which is really quite widespread even among people who are otherwise quite reasonable (i.e., it’s not just the black-helicopter paranoid types). It’s one of the main things that make enforcing these laws such an uphill battle.