Fourth District Congressman Barney Frank has proposed a House bill that would pay for as much as $200,000 of the roughly $400,000 in legal bills that Yacubian ran up while fighting rogue National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration law enforcement.
Frank's bill, along with similar ones previously proposed in the Senate by John Kerry and Scott Brown, would provide the legal reimbursement for the 11 Northeast fishermen that a special master this spring found had been crushingly abused by NOAA officials.
Though cases like Yacubian's were but a handful in the thousands of citations issued by NOAA over the last 20 years, they accomplished their mission: They scared the very lifeblood out of fishermen from Maine to New Jersey.
"A vast majority of fishermen, fishing businesses and the lawyers that represent them have no confidence that any sort of justice would prevail by appealing a case to the Coast Guard Administrative Law Judge," wrote Special Master Charles B. Swartwood III in his April report.
Read the complete opinion piece from The Standard-Times.