Mining protesters appeal W.Va. restraining orders

CHARLESTON, W.Va.

Holding up a photo of a mountaintop removal coal mining site, a lawyer for environmentalists urged West Virginia's Supreme Court on Tuesday to intervene in a lower court's orders barring protesters from Massey Energy Co. operations.

The lawyer, Roger Forman, said the Raleigh County Circuit Court orders were too broad and could potentially apply to the justices themselves or anyone else.

Several judges issued the orders amid a civil disobedience campaign directed at Massey sites by the group Climate Ground Zero that has resulted in more than 100 arrests since Feb. 2009. Four protesters were convicted in May of violating those orders, fined and ordered to pay nearly $20,000 in legal fees.

Appealing on behalf of those environmentalists as well, Forman argued that the harm from mountaintop removal outweigh the potential harm to Virginia-based Massey, which sought the restraining orders and wants them upheld.

"What they did was appropriate," Forman said of the environmentalists. "They have a goal of protesting, and freedom of the press is being abridged. It's just an abomination."

Those targeted by the orders included Antrim Caskey, a photographer who moved from New York to Rock Creek to document the destruction from mountaintop mining. Forman argues she is an embedded photojournalist and should be exempt from the restraining order.

Several of the justices questioned whether Forman waited too long to appeal at least some of the orders, issued a year or more ago. Forman asked the high court to consider the various orders and the contempt proceedings as part of an ongoing case that he could not appeal until the May convictions.

Mountaintop removal involves the blasting open of ridgelines to expose the coal seams beneath, with the leftover rock and soil dumped into the valleys below. Massey and other producers that use the practice find it highly productive. Opponents decry the effects of blasting and of the filling of valleys on the streams and wildlife they contain.

Harrison County Circuit Judge James Matish heard the appeal petition in place of Justice Brent Benjamin. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that Benjamin could not consider a Massey-related appeal after its chief executive, Don Blankenship, spent more than $3 million to aid his 2004 election to the court.