Did Abner Schoenwetter spend 6.5 years in jail because he used plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes when importing lobsters from Honduras?

Question

Forbes states that:

Abner Schoenwetter was importing seafood to sell to U.S. restaurants for over 12 years from Honduras. Those shipments were overseen by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) who inspected the shipments and found everything in order, including the plastic bags used to ship the frozen Caribbean lobsters (see the U.S. Department of Justice Charges here). That plastic, and not a box, is a "no-no" according to the Lacey Act which was enforced by another U.S. government entity, National Marine Fishery Service. Schoenwetter was prosecuted and was sentenced to 8 years in federal prison, which he completed in August of 2010 (he's still on probation).

A similar claim is made by The Heritage Foundation:

Four people, caught in the government's net, face as many as eight years in prison because U.S. officials have decided to prosecute them for alleged violations of the Lacey Act, a law that permits the government to indict individuals for importing "fish or wildlife taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of ... any foreign law." On top of that, the government seized the entire shipment -- more than $4 million worth of lobsters.

Unfortunately the link to the US Department of Justice is no longer available and I consider the claim outrageous if true, and both Forbes and The Heritage Foundation are at least somewhat biased. So is it true that Abner Schoenwetter spent 6.5 years in jail for importing lobsters in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes?

Answer 1

To summarize: Honduras has regulations about what lobsters can be fished (to prevent over-exploitation). The defendants knowingly broke these regulations and then tried to hide their illegal activities by breaking more laws to smuggle the lobsters into the US.

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Archive.org has the DoJ article. According to that, the Lacey Act states that fish/wildlife can’t be imported/sold/etc if foreign laws were broken. The relevant Honduran laws cited in the case are:

1. Resolution 030-95 prohibited harvesting, processing, or selling any spiny lobster with a tail length shorter than 5 1/2 inches
2. Article 70(3) of the Fishing Law prohibited harvesting or selling egg-bearing lobsters
3. Article 30 of the Fishing Law required lobster fishermen to dock their vessels and unload their catch in a Honduran port before exportation
4. Articles 35 and 37 of the Fishing Law required fishing vessels to report their catch in writing to Honduran authorities
5. Agreement 0008-93 required that any lobster be inspected and processed in Honduras before exportation.

• Resolution 30-95 seems to be Decreto Legislativo 30-95, which ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity
• An English translation of the Fishing Law is available online.
• Agreement 0008-93 (“Acuerdo 0008 del 93”) also has an English summary online

The fact that the lobsters were in bags and not boxes was only briefly mentioned. No law was mentioned here, so it doesn’t seem to have had much or any impact on the case.

In the end, the DoJ reports the charges were:

Following a jury trial, all four petitioners were convicted of conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. 371 for their part in the unlawful importation scheme. McNab, Blandford, and Schoenwetter were convicted of knowingly importing merchandise into the United States contrary to law in violation of 18 U.S.C. 545. [...] In total, McNab was found guilty on 28 counts, Blandford on 37 counts, Schoenwetter on 7 counts, and Huang on 17 counts.

The referenced laws from that section are:

• 18 U.S.C. 371: Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States
• 18 U.S. Code § 545 - Smuggling goods into the United States

See also

• Fisherman's tale at heart of battle over wildlife-trafficking law
• Case Law Database

Answer 2

Yes, but only as one of the charges and the fact that the lobster tails were undersized was considered the bigger issue(however, he could technically have been jailed just for the bags).

Prosecutors insist the packaging issue is misleading at best, in part because the primary basis of the prosecution was on the size of the lobster tails, not on the packaging.

However, the actual bigger scandal here, is the fact that the Honduran government filed a friend of the court brief in support of the accused and outright stated that the law they broke was out-dated and they didn't care about the bags or the length was irrelevant, is the real scandal here IMO:

during briefing on petitioners' second set of appeals, the Embassy of Honduras and the Asociacion de Pescadores del Caribe, a Honduran trade association, filed a joint amicus curiae brief in support of McNab. Id. at 20a n.23 Although Honduran officials had assisted and supported the prosecution throughout the investigation and trial of this case, the Embassy and trade association's brief maintained that certain of the Honduran laws underlying petitioners' convictions were invalid at the time of the lobster shipments or had been repealed and that the United States had failed to consult with the proper Honduran officials and, instead, had intentionally sought out "midlevel employees who were not authorized to render opinions on behalf of the Honduran government":https://web.archive.org/web/20141013050053/http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/2003/0responses/2003-0622.resp.html

The US court ruled that since US officials had confirmed with some Honduran officials that the laws were on the books, the conviction could stand. The world is full of ancient forgotten about laws that stick around on the books, unenforced for decades, because it's too much bother to update them, or people are confused as to what the law actually is. E.g. it's still, in 2021, technically illegal to play games or cards on a Sunday in Alabama Max $100 fine or 3 months of hard labor, which gives you a clue as to when that law was written.