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Fuglvog Associate Fined for Illegal Fishing |
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Friday, 16 November 2012 |
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Matt Miller/KTOO
A commercial fisherman who was a former associate of Arne Fuglvog will have to pay a hundred-thousand dollars for his own illegal fishing activities.
Freddie Joe Hankins was sentenced last week to three years probation and will have all of his future fishing activities recorded by an electronic monitoring device. Twenty-five-thousand dollars will be in the form of a fine and $75,000 will be a community service payment. He'll also be required to have a statement acknowledging his wrongdoing published in National Fisherman magazine.
The 47-year old fisherman from Cove, Oregon was acquitted in August of making a false statement and making a false Individual Fishing Quota landing report for black cod caught in April 2007. But he was convicted on two identical charges for a landing made in May 2007.
Federal fisheries investigators alleged that Hankins
harvested about 47,800 pounds of black cod that were counted toward his
Individual Fishing Quota for the Central Gulf of Alaska area, when the
fish were actually caught in the Western Yakutat area by Fuglvog's boat
Kamilar. The fish allegedly had an ex-vessel value of over $222,000 and
was eventually transported across state lines from where it was landed
in Yakutat to Seattle.
Taking the stand was Hankins
himself who denied fishing illegally, while Fuglvog served as a witness
for the prosecution.
According to the U-S Attorneys
office, Judge H- Russell Holland determined that Hankins perjured
himself when he denied falsifying reports. Judge Holland found that
Hankins was still in a state of denial about committing the crimes for
which the jury returned with guilty verdicts.
During the
trial, Hankins attorney disputed the reliability of G-P-S data taken
from the Kamilar's navigational computer.
Fuglvog,
convicted of falsifying his own fishing records, was sentenced in
February to five months in federal prison, fined $50,00, ordered to pay
$100,000 in a community service payment to the National Fish and
Wildlife Foundation, and be on supervised release for a year. In
addition to working in the office of Senator Lisa Murkowski, Fuglvog was
a former North Pacific Fishery Management Council member and a one-time
candidate to head the National Marine Fisheries Service.
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