July 13, 2012 — Nationally prominent attorneys James P. “Bud” Walsh and Eldon C.V. Greenberg have petitioned the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to undertake a suite of reforms needed to make its federal fisheries law enforcement system “more fair and balanced.”
A key element in the proposal would rein in enforcement attorneys who, wrote Walsh, a partner in the San Francisco firm Davis Wright Tremaine and a former deputy NOAA administrator, continue to “wield inordinate power.”
The excessive liberties allowed NOAA lawyers and litigators was the first item in the initial report on NOAA fisheries enforcement excesses, in January 2010, by Commerce Department Inspector General Todd Zinser.
“Lack of management attention, direction and oversight has led to regional enforcement elements operating autonomously,” Zinser wrote.
Zinser was called in by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco after she received a strongly worded letter by members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation; it urged an independent evaluation of chronic complaints of law enforcement excesses including the settling of grudges against fishermen. The epicenter of the complaints was the Gloucester Display Auction, then owned and operated by the Ciulla family.
In May 2011, responding to multiple reports by the inspector general and an encyclopedic set of case studies by a special judicial master retained by then Commerce Secretary Gary Locke (now the ambassador to China), 11 of the victims of the most egregious cases of injustice were given a cabinet level apology along with more than $600,000 in reparations.
Before he left Commerce to become ambassador to China, Locke authorized the master, Charles B. Swartwood III, to take on a new batch of more than 60 cases for review to determine whether rights were violated by NOAA agents and lawyers. Swartwood delivered his report to then-Commerce Secretary John Bryson in early May. Bryson, however, resigned June 21 after being involved two weeks earlier in a bizarre air of highway crashes outside of Los Angeles, and never acted on the second Swartwood report.
The initial report was redacted and released in little more than a month. No explanation for the delay on the new report has been offered by Commerce Department Chief Counsel Cameron Kerry – Sen. John Kerry’s brother – or NOAA Chief Counsel Lois Schiffer.
Walsh’s letter to Lubchenco cited the inspector general and Swartwood’s work on law enforcement failings, adding, “It is time that NOAA’s civil penalty procedural regulations were significantly changed to provide more balance to the process and a greater degree of fairness for those charged with civil violations.” Walsh identified his co-petitioners as Greenberg, who hedadswner of the Washington, D.C., firm Garvey Schubert Barer, and Michael Stanley, a former NOAA enforcement attorney.
Read the full story in the Gloucester Times