RENO - Lawyers for two men accused of looting American Indian artifacts said Thursday that the real culprit is the U.S. Forest Service because it failed to mark the site on the edge of Reno as culturally significant.
Federal prosecutors urged a U.S. District Court jury to hold the two men responsible for stealing three boulders with artwork etchings that tribal leaders say are priceless and more than 1,000 years old.
But the defense lawyers said John Ligon, 40, Reno, and Carrol Mizell, 44, Van Nuys, Calif., removed three boulders with the petroglyphs from national forest land and placed them in Ligon's front yard to protect them from an encroaching subdivision.
"He would have never taken them and displayed them in his front yard if he thought they were government property," said Scott Freeman, Ligon's lawyer.
"Ignorance is a legal excuse in this case," he said in opening arguments before U.S. District Judge Howard McKibben.
A federal grand jury indicted Ligon and Mizell in October on charges of unlawful excavation of archaeological resources and theft of government property in violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act.
"Not only are persons who commit such crimes destroying the cultural heritage of Native Americans, but they spoil the opportunity for everyone to enjoy these resources in their natural environment," Dan Bogden, U.S. attorney for Nevada, said at the time.
The crimes carry potential maximum sentences of more than 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.
The site is located on Peavine Peak within a few hundred yards of backyards in a neighborhood in northwest Reno where hundreds of new homes are scheduled to be built this year.
"The event was precipitated by the desire of Mr. Mizell to protect these rocks, to avoid having these rocks lost, these boulders bulldozed, to avoid having the developers literally chew them up and spit them out," Houston said.
Although the Forest Service has posted a series of small boundary markers near the site, the defense lawyers said the agency has decided against posting signs at the petroglyph site since the Smithsonian Institution first formally recognized it in 1983.
That decision was reaffirmed several times in recent years despite concerns raised about the threat of vandalism or damage from development, they said.
"The government has put the blame on somebody else because the government didn't manage it properly for 25 years," Houston said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Gifford said the Forest Service decided, in consultation with tribal leaders and state historians, that the best way to protect the petroglyphs was not to mark the site.
In some cases, federal agencies post signs to designate the location of petroglyphs or Indian artifacts but those are typically in high-traffic areas, Gifford said. Terry Birk, an archaeologist for the Forest Service, said the agency agreed that posting signs could increase the threat of damage to the site.
