Opinion ID: 186000
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Specification One

Text: 72 Specification one charged Secretary Norton with [f]ailing to comply with the Court's Order of December 21, 1999, to initiate a Historical Accounting Project. Contempt Opinion, 226 F.Supp.2d at 20. The district court said with regard to this specification that Secretary Norton had committed litigation misconduct, referring principally to its finding that [b]etween December 21, 1999 and July 10, 2001 the Department had failed to take any steps toward completing an accounting. Id. at 113. The court characterized the Department's actions taken since that time as too little, too late, and stated that Interior cannot rely on efforts undertaken at the late date of June, 2001 to avoid a contempt citation. Id. at 115. In fact, the district court described its holding as being that the defendants unreasonably delayed initiating the historical accounting project. Id. at 118. 73 Because Secretary Norton cannot be held criminally liable for contempt based upon the conduct of her predecessor in office, her contempt conviction cannot stand; she simply cannot be held criminally to account for any delay that occurred prior to her assuming office. Of the one and one-half year delay about which the district court was concerned, more than a year was on someone else's watch. 74 Moreover, the district court's findings clearly indicate that in her first six months in office Secretary Norton took significant steps toward completing an accounting. By June 2001 the Secretary had contracted with EDS, a national consulting firm, to evaluate the status of the TAAMS project, id. at 86, and by November 2001 the Department had proposed a reorganization plan aimed at eliminating the problems EDS had identified. Id. at 45. In July 2001 Secretary Norton created the Office of Historical Trust Accounting, which has since made significant progress toward completing an accounting. Id. at 44-45. Hence, the Court Monitor stated in his Fifth Report, [t]here is no doubt the OHTA has made more progress ... in six months [July through December, 2001] than the past administration did in six years. 75 These uncontested facts are inconsistent with a finding that Secretary Norton failed to comply with the district court's order of December 21, 1999. Therefore, we hold the district court erred as a matter of law in holding Secretary Norton in criminal contempt on specification one.