Every good story has a back story.
And the story behind a grouper-boat captain’s case rising to the U.S. Supreme Court should be — pun intended — a whopper. You decide.
John L. Yates, of Holmes Beach, ran commercial boats out of Cortez for 10 or so years, when on Aug. 23, 2007, federal agents boarded the Miss Katie some 100 miles west in Gulf waters.
The agents observed three fish that appeared short and began sorting through the 3,000 pound catch for more short fish.
And, as the boat rocked back and forth on the Gulf, the agents measured 72 fish short of the-then 20-inch minimum.
They advised Yates to place the fish in wooden crates — lacking evidence tape to secure them, they told him not to remove the fish — and to meet them ashore with the crate at the conclusion of his trip, which he did.
Florida Fish and Wildlife agents, cross-deputized as National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration agents, came to the fish house four days later with guns drawn, according to Yates.
At the Cortez dock, the agents re-measured the fish, but counted only 69 red grouper in the container.
According to John and Sandy Yates, it was then federal enforcers started to contrive a case that Yates ordered his crew to throw the 72 crated fish overboard, replacing them with 69 different fish.
To this day, Sandy and John Yates deny the insinuation, dispute the agents’ measurements and disavow the crew member’s testimony that built the prosecutor’s case.
At trial, the question of shrinkage and measurement was crucial, Sandy Yates explained.
When the state did not call its listed expert, her husband’s attorney tried, but the trial judge would not allow the testimony on a technicality — the expert had not been noticed as one of Yates’ witnesses.
“After four days, on ice, being packed and unpacked, and then sent up and down a hot conveyor, fish will shrink,” John Yates said.
And, John Yates points to another injustice that went into the jury’s deliberations.
A jury was given a chart that exaggerated the different measurements at harvest and four days later, which were, on average, about a half-inch short, they said.
Over the past seven years, Yates endured an unofficial black-listing in the fishing community, no longer being asked to captain a boat, which he now says he’d do “in a heartbeat.”
The years took a toll on the family, Sandy Yates explained.
Friends and their hard work — John Yates jumping on boats as a deck hand, consulting, scrapping metal and painting and Sandy Yates holding several jobs, while opening a store with their savings — have pulled them through.
“We know what is right and real and who our friends are,” Sandy Yates said.
She’s also encouraged by the justices’ review.
“I love them, Scalia, Roberts and Alito,” she said after attending the Nov. 5 oral arguments of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This is the last department of common sense available and I believe it truly is, after what we’ve seen,” she said.
For the rest of the story on Yates’ Supreme Court hearing, look online at www.islander.org.