Cliven Bundy’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Jailed Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is filing a lawsuit against Barack Obama, challenging his placement in solitary confinement and seeking to dismiss the federal government’s felony charges that could condemn him to die behind bars.
The suit from the rancher, who led a high-profile standoff against the government in 2014, also names US judge Gloria Navarro and Nevada senator Harry Reid and will be filed on Tuesday, according to Bundy’s attorney, Joel Hansen, who provided the Guardian with a draft copy.
The complaint offers a defense of the 70-year old’s infamous comment that black people may have been “better off as slaves, picking cotton” and slams Obama for “despicable disrespectful mocking” of Bundy at the 2014 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The lawsuit comes as Bundy faces numerous federal charges stemming from the April 2014 showdown at his property when authorities tried unsuccessfully to seize his cattle and faced off with hundreds of supporters, some heavily armed, who defended the family’s ranch in Bunkerville, about 80 miles north-east of Las Vegas.
For more than 20 years, Bundy had refused to pay grazing fees to the federal government, arguing that the US Bureau of Land Management had no authority to regulate ranchers and that his cattle should be able to roam freely on public lands. The activist, who has become the unofficial leader of the land-use rights movement in the American west, avoided consequences for years until he was taken into custody in February.
Bundy, along with four of his sons and a dozen activists, now faces charges of conspiring against the US, assaulting and threatening law enforcement, using firearms to commit violence, and interference with interstate commerce by extortion.
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