2:00 PM at the Federal Courthouse, downtown SLC
Rick Koerber, “the Free Capitalist,” was a keynote speaker at Lysander Spooner University’s “The Struggle for Freedom” symposium in downtown Las Vegas on December 16, 2017.
Rick gave a passionate lecture on criminal justice and government overreach. Rick had himself been facing multi-count criminal indictments for some ten years.
In spite of his own legal troubles, Rick was an invaluable member of the Bundy defense team (along with LSU founder Roger Roots and many others) who helped hand the U.S. Justice Department its greatest defeat in history. Between 2014 and 2018 the DOJ spent some quarter of a billion dollars trying to convict and imprison the Bundys and dozens of other courageous Americans for their constitutional stands.
Rick and Roger spent many hundreds of hours doing legal research and preparing memos and briefs to support the defendants. As of this date, not a single Bundy has been convicted of a single count, and only Todd Engel, Greg Burleson and Jerry Delemus remain incarcerated—with Engel and Burleson currently appealling.)
It was Rick Koerber who stayed up all night on the evening of October 25, 2016 drafting a motion to remove Juror #11 in the first Oregon Bundy trial after another juror slipped a note to the judge indicating that Juror #11 was biased. The motion was granted the following morning and an alternate juror helped secure acquittals for all defendants.
That verdict shocked the world.
Soon thereafter, federal prosecutors re-launched various tax and bank fraud allegations against Rick. The claims related to Rick’s decade-old real estate investment business in which Rick and other investors had invested in Utah’s burgeoning real estate market. The market collapsed in 2008 leaving Rick and others with losses. Rick was also a prominent libertarian radio host and his political enemies saw an opportunity to accuse Rick of wrongdoing.
By 2016, the charges against Rick had been effectively dismissed. But when federal prosecutors saw Rick working as a paralegal for the Bundy defense team in Oregon, prosecutors re-filed the same allegations. After a mistrial in 2017, Rick was finally convicted by a jury in July 2018. (Prosecutors had succeeded in getting the removal of Rick’s defense attorney Marcus Mumford.)
More recently, a federal judge ordered Rick detained until sentencing on ridiculously contrived grounds. Some observers see the move as a sign that the judge intends to sentence Rick to decades behind bars.
Please join us in support of Rick Koerber at the Salt Lake City federal courthouse on Tuesday October 15.
