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- <text id=93TT0961>
- <title>
- Jan. 25, 1993: Sometimes It Takes a Cowboy
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Jan. 25, 1993 Stand and Deliver: Bill Clinton
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- LAW, Page 58
- Sometimes it Takes a Cowboy
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>In the showdown at Rocky Flats, Rockwell and Uncle Sam face
- the grand jury that won't go away
- </p>
- <p>By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK - With reporting by Joni H. Blackman/
- Denver and Elaine Shannon/Washington
- </p>
- <p> It sounds like the perfect plot for a western. A bunch of
- ordinary citizens, led by a reluctant but idealistic cowboy,
- tries to see that justice is done--but ends up in a showdown
- with some barons of Big Business. This story, though, takes
- place in the new West, and while the cowboy is real enough, the
- business in question is nothing so benign as a railroad monopoly
- or a cattle cartel. It is the Rockwell International Corp.,
- former manager of the U.S. Department of Energy's infamous Rocky
- Flats nuclear weapons plant, 15 miles northwest of Denver.
- </p>
- <p> For nearly three years, rancher Wes McKinley chaired a
- special federal grand jury investigating charges that Rockwell
- had committed horrific crimes against the environment, letting
- toxic chemicals poison the soil and groundwater around the plant
- and allowing the grounds of the facility to become contaminated
- with radioactive plutonium wastes. But though the panel voted
- to indict Rockwell, five of its employees and three people
- working for the DOE, federal prosecutors cut a deal last March.
- No one was indicted, Rockwell got off with an $18.5 million
- fine, and the grand jury members were told to go home.
- </p>
- <p> They refused. Unwilling to let the case die and the
- alleged culprits get off so lightly, the panel kept meeting,
- petitioned Congress for an investigation and finally wrote
- President-elect Clinton to ask for a special prosecutor. Someone--possibly a member of the grand jury--leaked the group's
- report, which had been sealed by the court, to the press. In
- response, the FBI is investigating whether the jurors have
- revealed too much about their deliberations, which by federal
- law must remain secret.
- </p>
- <p> The jurors haven't lowered their profiles, though. Seven
- of them appeared last week on the newsmagazine show Dateline
- NBC. While careful not to discuss the specifics of the case,
- they made it clear they were dissatisfied with the outcome.
- Said McKinley in an interview with TIME: "The judge told us to
- do as we saw right, and we believed that. The grand jury did
- its job. Now it's in the hands of the American people."
- Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University
- environmental-law expert who is representing the jurors without
- charge, said that "the deal Rockwell cut in Rocky Flats would
- make John Gotti blush. The jurors were left with a series of
- unanswered questions, and they didn't go public until after they
- learned their report would never be aired."
- </p>
- <p> Two weeks ago, the investigations subcommittee of the
- House Committee on Science, Space and Technology entered the
- fray with a report charging that the Justice Department had
- given Rockwell too sweet a deal. At best, the report said, the
- prosecution was hampered by the Justice Department's tendency
- to treat environmental crimes as unimportant; at worst, Justice
- may have gone out of its way to downplay the DOE's failure to
- ride herd on Rockwell. Said the subcommittee chairman, Democrat
- Harold Wolpe of Michigan: "The most important thing that federal
- prosecutors bargained away in negotiations with Rockwell was the
- truth."
- </p>
- <p> All the fuss has stunned Kenneth Fimberg, the government's
- lead prosecutor in the Rocky Flats affair, who defended the
- deal with Rockwell. "It was a world-record result," he said.
- "It was a watershed development in the enforcement of
- environmental law at DOE facilities." Indeed, the fine against
- Rockwell was roughly five times as high as the previous record
- for a hazardous-waste case, and in Fimberg's opinion, taking it
- to trial would have been risky. "It would have been an extremely
- difficult case, factually, legally and scientifically," he said.
- And federal appeals courts have ruled that a prosecutor has
- final say over whether an indictment will go forward.
- </p>
- <p> Particularly disturbing to Fimberg was the subcommittee
- report, which implied a possible cover-up to protect the Energy
- Department. Said Fimberg: "The protect-DOE stuff did not happen.
- I told that to the committee. Those people are looking for the
- conclusion they want, and there's no evidence to support it."
- Then why not make the grand jury's report public? Because, as
- presiding Judge Sherman Finesilver observed, federal law says
- a public report by a grand jury is permissible only in certain
- organized-crime cases.
- </p>
- <p> Besides, Fimberg contended, a 128-page sentencing
- memorandum, made public at the time of the plea agreement,
- served the same purpose as the grand jurors' report. Said the
- prosecutor: "I don't think any intellectually honest person can
- read it and say it isn't a scathing criticism of the DOE."
- </p>
- <p> So, is this a case of honest citizens fighting a cynical
- judicial system that's in cahoots with the military-industrial
- complex, or is it a situation in which naive amateurs and
- radical environmentalists are refusing to listen to reason?
- Should the case against Rockwell and DOE employees be reopened?
- Or should those ornery grand jurors be prosecuted for violating
- their oath of secrecy? If this were just a Clint Eastwood epic,
- the answers would be simple. But in this real-life showdown, it
- may take a special prosecutor to see through the smoke. Like
- many bits of unfinished business, the saga of Rocky Flats now
- awaits a decision from the new Administration in Washington.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-