September 29, 2020 — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected an appeal from Pacific Choice Seafood Company challenging the National Marine Fisheries Service rule on single-entity quota cap in the non-whiting groundfish fisheries off the West Coast.
The panel affirmed the district court’s summary judgment entered in favor of NMFS rule, limiting the total allowable catch and prohibiting any one entity from controlling more than 2.7 percent of the outstanding quota share.
September 23, 2020 — The federal government said in a court filing Monday that a new Trump administration ban on oil drilling off the south Atlantic coast doesn’t stop companies from requesting to search for oil in those waters.
The case involves two consolidated lawsuits challenging permits issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service that allow seismic testing companies to disturb marine life.
The testing involves shooting air gun blasts at the ocean floor to map whether fossil fuels lie underneath. It has been shown to harm sea life such as whales.
The litigation fell into question briefly when President Donald Trump announced earlier this month he was ordering a 10-year ban on drilling off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.
September 21, 2020 — The Hawaii Supreme Court heard arguments Friday on the legality of granting licenses to foreign workers in Hawaii’s longline commercial fishing fleet, which for years has been under scrutiny after an Associated Press investigation revealed claims of human trafficking and questionable labor practices.
The case involves the issuance of Hawaii state commercial fishing licenses to individual foreign fishermen who are not “lawfully admitted” to the United States.
State law says only those legally in the country can get licenses to catch and sell marine life, but the workers do not have visas to enter the U.S. so they are ordered to live onboard the fishing boats by federal officials. They must eat, sleep and work on the boats, often for years at a time, and are subject to deportation.
Friday’s hearing stems from a petition that was filed by a Native Hawaiian fisherman who sought to have the state enforce a statute that declares only people who are in the U.S. legally can acquire commercial fishing licenses.
The petition was denied by the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, which issues the permits, and a lower court upheld the ruling before the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
September 11, 2020 — The following was released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration:
A North Carolina man pleaded guilty today before U.S. District Judge James C. Dever III in the Eastern District of North Carolina on charges that his company, Garland F. Fulcher Seafood Company Inc. (Garland Fulcher), at his direction, falsely labeled hundreds of thousands dollars’ worth of foreign crabmeat as “Product of USA.”
According to information in the public record, Jeffrey A. Styron was the treasurer of the corporate board of officers for Garland Fulcher, a North Carolina company engaged in the business of purchasing, processing, packaging, transporting and selling seafood and seafood products, including crabmeat from domestically harvested blue crab.
As treasurer, Styron was responsible for overseeing the daily operations of the company’s crab-related business, which involved managing and directing employees of the company with respect to the processing, packaging, and labeling of crab meat. Styron pleaded guilty to a one-count information charging him with substituting foreign crabmeat for domestic blue crab and, as part of the plea, Styron admitted to falsely labeling crabmeat with a retail market value of at least $250,000 dollars, which was sold primarily to small seafood retailers and restaurants.
“Blue crabs are a classic American seafood product and a vital resource for coastal communities in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and other parts of the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “This investigation is part of the department’s mission to work with our law enforcement partners in the protection of Atlantic blue crab populations and other marine resources.”
“Seafood mislabeling is consumer fraud that undermines efforts of hardworking, honest fisherman and the free market by devaluing the price of domestic seafood,” said U.S. Attorney Robert J. Higdon Jr. for the Eastern District of North Carolina. “In this case, the fraudulent scheme artificially deflated the cost of domestic blue crab and gave Styron and Garland Fulcher Seafood an unacceptable and unfair economic advantage over law-abiding competitors.”
September 11, 2020 — Michael Foy, the U.S. longline captain jailed in the British Virgin Islands since June 11, has seen his trial postponed on Tortola until Oct. 1 as the island goes through another round of covid-19 partial shutdowns, according to Foy’s family.
Foy and his local attorney arrived in court as scheduled Sept. 9 only to be told the hearing was rescheduled, according to his brother Joe Foy.
Responding to urgent requests from his lawyers in Tortola and the U.S., the National Marine Fisheries Service produced 27 pages of documentation from Foy’s vessel monitoring system, with data showing he fished far from BVI waters. They have that evidence in hand for when they do get a court hearing, according to Joe Foy.
Michael Foy’s vessel Rebel Lady was laid to offshore June 8, waiting for customs clearance to enter the port of Road Town as he had done many times before, but Foy was arrested after BVI authorities instructed him to follow a customs vessel into the harbor.
September 10, 2020 — United States District Court Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., handed down his remedy Aug. 19 to the National Marine Fisheries Services, which he ruled last spring had violated the Endangered Species Act in licensing the fisheries in the northeastern U.S.
He gave the NMFS until May 31, 2021, to conduct a new biological opinion on the fishing industry’s impacts on the endangered right whale species and measures to decrease whale deaths caused by the industry, vacating the previous biological opinion.
Earlier this year he found that the NMFS had failed to file an incidental take report in 2014 after discovering the vertical lines used in the fishing industry could be responsible for up to three whale deaths a year, which is more than the species can sustain, according to NMFS’ own calculations.
Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Law Foundation, Defenders of Wildlife and the Humane Society of the United States, the plaintiffs in the case, requested over 5,000 square miles south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where large numbers of whales congregate, be closed to vertical line fishing.
Intervenors in the case argued that closing off that area to fishing would place more nets outside its boundaries, creating a situation where lines are closer together, increasing entanglement risks for whales trying to reach the area considered for fishing closure.
The judge decided against the plaintiffs’ request because there is no legal precedent for such an action, he said in his opinion. He decided it would be too detrimental to the New England fishing industry that is already struggling because of the coronavirus.
September 9, 2020 — For the second time in two years, a federal court has ruled that National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) violated the nation’s fishery management law — the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act or MSA — by not using the ‘best available science’ in setting static catch limits on a widely fluctuating anchovy biomass. But an important industry group of harvesters and processors who are also involved in scientific research projects, take issue with the decision.
“Long story short, the judge ruled on a ‘what if’ worst case scenario, not on the reality of anchovy abundance now, or our little anchovy fishery, which food habits studies have shown take less than 1 percent of the anchovy consumed by predators,” said Diane Pleshner-Steele, the executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association. The CWPA is also an intervenor-defendant in the suit.
September 8, 2020 — Shark fin soup, considered a delicacy in some countries, has long fueled demand for illegally harvested fins. But federal authorities in Georgia announced this week that they had dismantled at least one source for the ingredient: a multimillion-dollar organization they described as an international money laundering, drug trafficking and illegal wildlife trade ring.
A dozen people, including Terry Xing Zhao Wu, 45, of Burlingame, Calif., and two businesses on opposite ends of the country face multiple charges, including fraud and money laundering, for their roles in what the authorities called the “Wu transnational criminal organization,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia said in a statement on Thursday.
“United with our partner agencies, we have shut down an operation that fed a seemingly insatiable overseas appetite for illegally traded wildlife, and seized ill-gotten assets derived from that despicable criminal enterprise,” Bobby L. Christine, the U.S. attorney for the district, said in the statement.
September 4, 2020 — Convicted New Bedford fishing scofflaw Carlos Rafael has been transferred within the federal Bureau of Prisons to “community confinement” in a move that could be the first step toward his return to society once his sentence is completed.
The Bureau of Prisons confirmed on Wednesday that the 68-year-old Rafael, known far and wide as “The Codfather” when he ruled the New Bedford docks with his seafood empire, was transferred on June 24 to community confinement overseen by the bureau’s Residential Reentry Management Office in Philadelphia. He is about 33 months into his 46-month sentence for massive cheating within the Northeast multispecies groundfish fishery,
The bureau said community confinement means Rafael either is in home confinement or at a residential reentry center — or halfway house — managed by the Residential Reentry Management Office in Philadelphia. It declined to state specifically where Rafael is.
“Carlos A. Rafael is still serving his sentence,” Emory Nelson, a bureau spokesman, stated in an email response to to the Gloucester Daily Times. “His projected date of release from the custody of the BOP is March 4, 2021. For privacy, safety, and security reasons, we do not release information on an individual inmate’s conditions of confinement.”
September 2, 2020 — A petition created on Change.org to free imprisoned commercial fisherman Michael Foy has gathered over 4,000 signatures.
Foy, who lives in Puerto Rico, has been imprisoned in Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, since June 8. As the captain of commercial fishing vessel Rebel Lady, Foy departed Puerto Rico for a fishing expedition on May 29. His vessel was carrying 7,000 pounds of fish when he was detained for illegally entering the British Virgin Islands during the pandemic. Foy allegedly believed that the BVI port had been closed, not the border itself. He was reportedly drifting near the coastal border off Norman Island while waiting to get customs clearance to return to Puerto Rico when a patrol boat escorted him to shore. Authorities arrested Foy for not only illegal entry, but for illegal fishing. His vessel was seized, as well as the cargo, which was worth a reported $60,000. He was placed in a cell, where he’s been sitting ever since.