Fishing industry attorney Stephen Ouellette is seeking bar association and congressional inquiries into the ethics of enforcement and litigation lawyers who, according to a U.S. Inspector General's report, have covered virtually their entire operating expenses — almost $1 million a year — on inflated fines they levy against fishing boats and shoreside businesses.
Those who set the level of penalties should not benefit from those penalties, Ouellette has asserted in a lengthy letter to Lois Schiffer, chief counsel for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Citing the ongoing, 13-month investigation into NOAA law enforcement practices by the Commerce Department Inspector General's office, Ouellette said the probe "now reveals for the first time that the NOAA Office of General Counsel for Enforcement and Litigation not only sets the fines, but budgets for them as revenue, apparently drawing 99 percent of its non-salary operating expense from the Asset Forfeiture Fund."
He wrote to Schiffer on Sunday, informing her that he was "requesting an ethical opinion from our (Massachusetts) Board of Bar Overseers as to the propriety of agency counsel acting in the dual role of prosecutor and initial agency fact finder, including the setting of fines, while deriving economic benefit from the fines they assess and collect, as well as the practice of resisting disclosure of the basis for setting those fines."
Also on Sunday, Ouellette summarized his lengthy letter to four congressional offices at the forefront of the policy and ethics' battles with NOAA — Sen. John Kerry and Reps. Barney Frank and John Tierney, all Massachusetts Democrats, and Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican.
The letter also openly challenges Schiffer's written plan not to look back at any miscarriages of justice by NOAA lawyers and agents. Due to Internet transmission problems, Schiffer's office could not be presented with questions about today's story until nearly deadline, so no responses were available.
Ouellette was the first lawyer to begin documenting the same catalogue of violations that Inspector General Todd Zinser has been bringing forward since March.
A 2001 Ouellette letter to the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy complained of "adoption of penalty schedules without public input and prevention of inquiry into the basis of levies for fines … in apparent violation of the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution," and creating "an air of distrust in the industry to further its enforcement actions, which threatens to undermine the industry…."