Ten Years, Ten Endangered Species Indictments

Flickr: Alan Vernon

Just how rare is it for corporations to face criminal charges for violating the Endangered Species Act?

We tried to answer that question last month when we wrote a story about Kauai's electric cooperative being indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly causing the deaths of rare seabirds. We spoke with a local environmental attorney, a national expert in bird-powerline interaction and Kauai Island Utility Cooperative's CEO. The consensus was that the indictment [pdf] was an uncommonly aggressive, though not unprecedented, step by the federal government.

We also put in a Freedom of Information Act request for documents [pdf] from the DOJ. We've finally received their response. Here it is:

Just kidding. Well, sort of.

It was a struggle to get the PDF embedded for public viewing. Multiple efforts to upload their response [pdf] to Slideshare.com yielded pages looking like a piano roll. It may be user error, or perhaps because the DOJ took steps to ensure we wouldn't crack their redactions. They blacked out some defendants' names and locations, saying that the information would be "an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." We resorted to an old-fashioned method: scanning in a hard copy.

The short answer is that there have been only nine similar cases across the country in the past decade. Here's the justice department's full response (with many names still blacked out):

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