Polluters Sentenced to the Sierra Club

When businessman Donald Bohnert leaves prison after serving a year for dumping hazardous waste, he will have to do more time--as a Sierra Club member.

Several other Ohio polluters also agreed to join the environmental group as part of their punishments, and the trend irritates some civil rights advocates.

The Washington Legal Foundation, a public-interest law center, intervened in Bohnert’s case, contending that the requirement for his early release from prison violates his constitutional right to freedom of association.

Bohnert thinks the condition is fair, said his lawyer, Mike Walton. The judge in the case, Thomas Nurre, said he took into account Bohnert’s age, 63, and his tuberculosis in granting early release.

Bohnert, a supplier of dry-cleaning products from Mount Healthy in suburban Cincinnati, will be on probation for five years. During that time, he must perform 1,000 hours of community service and attend Sierra Club meetings regularly.

He pleaded guilty last year to 219 counts of illegally transporting, storing and dumping hazardous wastes. He used a self-storage space to stash contaminated dry-cleaning filters, paint wastes, thinner from auto body shops and sludge-filled drums. Bohnert also dumped waste in creeks.

Nurre, a Common Pleas judge, sentenced Bohnert to eight years in prison and fined him $2.1 million. Bohnert is scheduled for release in November.

“I came up with the idea of sentencing him to the club after thinking about what they stand for and what they do, as opposed to what he was doing to the air and to the ecology,” Nurre said.

The 100-year-old Sierra Club, with 621,000 members nationwide, promotes enjoyment of the outdoors and responsible use of natural resources.

The legal foundation, based in Washington, D.C., filed a complaint with the Ohio Supreme Court on March 26, contending that the Sierra Club condition requires Bohnert to support “a highly activist and politically oriented special interest group.”

“Just because a defendant agrees to do something that is improper doesn’t make it right,” said a foundation spokesman, Paul Kamener.

The state Supreme Court’s disciplinary counsel is required to investigate the complaint. Such investigations, which are confidential, can take several weeks.

“We have the freedom to choose what groups we belong to,” said Jim Rogers, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Cincinnati chapter, which is looking into the case. “Heaven forbid that anyone in government should order us to have to belong to a particular group.”

It wasn’t the first time an Ohio judge turned to the Sierra Club in dealing with polluters. (Alex Levinson, a lawyer at the environmental group’s national headquarters in San Francisco, said his organization did not know if judges elsewhere were doing the same thing.)

Joseph Rauh, president of an Akron rubber company, and employee Larry Knepp were convicted last July of illegally dumping 32 drums of toxic waste at five sites in northeast Ohio. They were ordered to join the club as part of their sentences.

The judge, Harry Klide, said he considered the memberships a way to “demonstrate to the community that we all have to be sensitized to the environment.”

Rauh would not comment. Repeated attempts to reach Knepp failed.

In February, a third Common Pleas judge, Ronald Bowman, ordered the owner of a Toledo electroplating company, Walter Mox, to be an active member of the Sierra Club for three years. Mox pleaded guilty to dumping lead-based sludge on the ground. Mox would not comment.

Bowman said judges have leeway in setting probation terms, such as ordering an offender with an alcohol problem to join Alcoholics Anonymous.

“If I order you to join AA . . . why can’t I put you in the Sierra Club? It’s the same type of thing,” he said.