Greeley Tribune
Jason Flores-Williams, left, defense attorney for Cullen Lobe, right, addresses a crowd Tuesday afternoon outside the Weld County Centennial Center, 915 10th St. in Greeley. The crowd arrived to support Lobe in his criminal trial, in which he is charged with misdemeanor trespass.
Attorneys Tuesday agreed to push back a court date in the case of a Colorado State University student charged with misdemeanor trespassing after he locked himself to a bulldozer to protest an oil and gas site near Greeley’s Bella Romero Academy.
A crowd of about 20 or 30 people gathered in support around Cullen Lobe, 23, outside the Weld County Court building Tuesday afternoon after his court appearance. Lobe arrived in Greeley for an arraignment — typically the part of the legal process during which a defendant enters a plea — but, as his attorney Jason Flores-Williams explained, Lobe did not enter a plea Tuesday. He will likely do that at his next court appearance in mid-August.
The reasons for the delay are both legal and complex. Lobe was arrested March 8 for trespassing on a site that belonged to Extraction Oil & Gas in the area of U.S. 34 and E. 20th Street and locking himself to a bulldozer there. He did so with four other people — members of an environmental advocacy group who disagree with oil and gas development near the school — as an act of protest, Flores-Williams said. He faces a criminal charge as a result of the incident.
But the day after his arrest, Extraction Oil & Gas filed a lawsuit against Lobe and other group members, seeking financial damages and an order banning them from the company’s property. That complicated the criminal case, Flores-Williams said, because action in one case might have an effect on the other.
“They really made the criminal case extremely difficult,” he said. “They’ve almost prevented us from being able to come in efficiently and proceed in the criminal litigation.”
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Source : Denver Post
