Judge discards rancher’s lawsuit
Monday, October 8, 2007 11:22 AM PDT
CASPER, Wyo. (AP) — A federal judge has dismissed a long-running lawsuit between a Wyoming rancher and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over federal land grazing permits.
U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Brimmer of Cheyenne on Friday granted a judgment against Harvey Frank Robbins Jr., who sued six BLM employees of trying to coerce him into granting an easement on a road leading to the Shoshone National Forest.
Brimmer dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. In the case, Robbins had maintained that BLM workers pulled his grazing permits and otherwise persecuted him to try to get him to give the government road access.
Robbins, who owns 55,000 acres of private land and leases about 55,000 acres from the BLM, has filed a number of lawsuits against the federal government. In this case, Robbins had appealed a decision from the U.S. District of Wyoming to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, which sided with his contention that federal employees are not immune from lawsuits under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law.
Government attorneys appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 7-2 in June that Robbins, of Thermopolis, did not have that right to sue individual federal employees.
That decision sent the case back to the 10th Circuit and then to Wyoming for Brimmer to act on the Supreme Court’s opinion.
Num wrote on Jun 3, 2008 10:41 AM: