A nightmare is over
Posted: Thursday, September 30, 2010 3:00 pm
http://www.enterprise-journal.com/opinion/article_2db7a8e6-ccc9-11df-a462-001cc4c03286.htmlA nightmare is over Wyatt Emmerich, Emmerich Newspapers
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Robbie Lucas Wrigley has been released from a federal penitentiary in Florida.
Readers may recall that two years ago, I wrote a series of columns chronicling the nightmare story of this mother of three children who was jailed for violations of EPA wetlands laws.
Now the nightmare is over. But it is still a bad dream. Her 70-year-old father and his 80-year-old engineer are still imprisoned. Her main concern now is freeing them.
Gov. Haley Barbour, Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant and Secretary of State Delbert Hoseman all wrote letters asking for clemency for Robbie Wrigley, but President Bush did nothing.
In the end, former U. S. Attorney Dunn Lampton contacted the federal prosecutor on the case. The prosecutor apparently felt the sentence was too harsh and used an arcane rule to get her released.
So now Robbie is with her 3-year-old child. She served 26 months out of an 87-month sentence.
I have covered many cases involving unfairly prosecuted people over my 30 years as a journalist, but none come close to this one.
Robbie Wrigley was a former school teacher, a nurse and a mother. She was on the board of the tennis association and founded her school’s booster club. She was a classic soccer mom who had never had so much as a speeding ticket.
She ran errands for her father, who developed land for low-income homes and trailers. Her father had a stellar career as a developer and had never even been sued over his 40-year career, much less accused of a crime.
Her father, Robert Lucas, was developing property 20 miles inland from Pascagoula when the EPA declared his property wetlands. The land looks like any other pineland in the area. The land is 100-feet above sea level. The nearest creek is 2.5 miles away.
On the advice of counsel, including a former head of the Department of Environmental Quality, Lucas fought the EPA through the local court system. He was winning.
Well, this just isn’t done. When the EPA declares your land wetlands, you just hand them the deed and walk away. Instead, Lucas fought and the whole arsenal of the federal legal machinery was launched against him. His daughter, a bystander, was caught in the crossfire.
Bear in mind, nobody knows what “wetlands” is. It is whatever the EPA says it is. In its latest wetlands ruling, the U. S. Supreme Court decried the wetlands laws as impossibly vague and hard to comprehend.
The EPA brought in a very competent special prosecutor from D.C. whose career depends on jailing polluters. The father, daughter and engineer were charged with all kinds of felonies. They pleaded innocent. Big mistake.
The jurors of the three-month trial were dishwashers, truck drivers and the like. Honest people, but not capable of discerning complex EPA regulations that Supreme Court justices can’t even figure out. Off they went to jail.
The presiding judge just recently set a national record for white-collar convictions. That’s an agenda. For the Lucas family, it was a perfect storm.
They were not even convicted of violating the Clean Water Act. They were convicted of conspiring to violate the Clean Water Act. All because they chose to fight the EPA rather than give up their land.
All this happened just after Hurricane Katrina wiped out Robbie’s family home. For days she and her husband Randy went around filling up generators so elderly strangers on respirators wouldn’t die. She went straight from her family’s FEMA trailer to federal prison.
“You try to do everything you can to help your neighbors and then the government ends up persecuting you,” she told me recently. “It makes you want to get in a shell and hide.
“It’s crazy. You can’t believe the things the government can do to you. I was so in the dark about why I was being convicted. They like to take people like me and make examples of them. I’m a former school teacher and a registered nurse. I’m no high-powered developer. I just helped by Dad by running errands for him.
Her husband Randy said Robbie’s release was a miracle of God. “So many people get caught in the system and are never heard from again.”
Her 3-year-old boy is much happier because he now has someone to call Momma. Robbie will also be able to attend her daughter’s graduation from Ole Miss law school. Jacklin is second in her class and law school president.
The Wrigley family was a hard-working, respected, affluent Mississippi family that did all the right things. They went to church. They gave to charity. They were involved in all the civic and school associations. Yet the federal government squashed them like bugs, just as the founding fathers of the nation feared would one day happen.
Robbie’s main goal is to get her father out. Robert is a Shriner and has been involved in numerous civic and charitable organizations.
“He’s never been in trouble a day in his life,” she said.
Robbie is worried that what I write will jeopardize her father’s position, so I submitted this column to her prior to publication. You can understand her fear.
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If I had my way - I would take every enviro marxist and put them on an inflatable boat in the pacific with chum in tow and let them set sail to the abyss.
