NCJ - DA'S PALCO LAWSUIT DISMISSED

DA'S PALCO LAWSUIT DISMISSED: The lawsuit that has defined county politics for two and a half years has been thrown out of court. Late Tuesday afternoon, Judge Richard Freeborn upheld the Pacific Lumber Co.'s objections to the fraud lawsuit filed against the company by the District Attorney's office in February 2003, shortly after DA Paul Gallegos and his deputy, Tim Stoen, took office. Essentially, Freeborn agreed with every argument made by Palco in their motion to dismiss the case. Specifically, he agreed with company claims that the alleged deception committed by the company during the negotiations with state and federal agencies over sale of the Headwaters Forest -- even if true -- is protected by the First Amendment, under a legal precedent known as the Noerr-Pennington doctrine. "Plaintiffs can not state a cause of action because PALCO's actions are constitutionally protected by Noerr," Freeborn wrote. The case filed by the DA alleged that the company intentionally defrauded the public by presenting false data on the relation between logging and landslides in late 1998; the company later presented a final, corrected version of the data to a regional office of the CDF -- rather than to the agency's headquarters in Sacramento, as procedure allegedly required -- two days after a final Environmental Impact Report on future management of the companies lands had been released. The company then asked for, and got, the right to log more intensively. In his ruling, Freeborn wrote that at the stage of the process in question, the company could be considered to be involved in "lobbying" -- a constitutionally protected right to petition the government -- rather than undergoing adjudicative review by agencies. Freeborn cited an earlier case to show what is legally allowable under the umbrella of lobbying activity: "Misrepresentations are a fact of life in politics, and lobbying is the sine qua non of democracy." It is not known if the District Attorney's Office will appear the ruling; Gallegos and Stoen could not be reached for comment.