United States v. Allen Elias
Opinion
Opinion
Nelson, J.
After a three-and-a-half-week trial, a jury convicted Allen Elias of four offenses, the most serious of which was disposing of hazardous waste without a permit, knowing that his actions placed others in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 6928 (e). Elias appeals on numerous grounds. We address several of them here and the remainder in a memorandum disposition filed contemporaneously.
I.
BACKGROUND
A. Offense Conduct
Allen Elias owned Evergreen Resources, a fertilizer company located near Soda Springs, Idaho. In August 1996, Elias decided to transfer sulfuric acid from two railroad cars into a stationary 25,000-gal-lon tank that he had transported to Evergreen from his previous business, AEI.
At AEI, Elias had used the thirty-six-foot-long, eleven-foot-high tank as a storage tank for byproducts of a cyanide leaching process he had patented. Elias realized that his process resulted in the transfer of cyanide-laced solids into the tank. He admitted, moreover, that there were one to two tons of cyanide-laced sludge left in the tank when he shipped it to Evergreen in the early 1990s. This sludge did not preclude Elias from using the tank…