U.S. v. WILLIAMS

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
LINDA L. WILLIAMS, Defendant-Appellant.
No. 09-1541.
United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit.
Filed September 27, 2010.
Before TACHA, LUCERO, and MURPHY, Circuit Judges.

ORDER AND JUDGMENT^{[ 1 ]}

MICHAEL R. MURPHY, Circuit Judge.
Linda L. Williams appeals from the district court's order affirming her conviction following a trial before a magistrate judge for damaging property of the National Forest Service. She argues that the testimony of a Forest Service police officer identifying her as the person seen on a surveillance video destroying a trailhead sign should not have been admitted at trial. We affirm.

BACKGROUND

Williams owns two unpatented mining claims comprising forty acres in the Uncompahgre National Forest in Ouray County, Colorado.^{[ 2 ]} Over the course of several years, Williams and the Forest Service clashed over Williams's resistance to inspections of her mining claims and her repeated attempts to block public access to the area, a popular hiking destination, including placing a locked gate on an access road and threatening to set "booby-trap[s]," ROA, Vol. 5 at 97. Williams also clashed with a private group that restores trails in the area, threatening a citizen's arrest of some of its members who were monitoring vandalism to trailhead signs. Ultimately, Williams was arrested and charged in a thirteen-count complaint with a variety of offenses, including damaging a trailhead sign. During a jury trial conducted by a magistrate judge, Forest Service police officer Jon Closson testified that he had interacted with Williams about six times over the past three years. He indicated that in April 2004, he installed a surveillance camera to monitor a newly erected wooden sign at a trail near Williams's mining claims. When he returned to the site several days later, he found the sign "smashed almost in half." Id. at 106...more