DC Tractor Man Sentence Slashed

A federal judge on Wednesday all but canceled a six-year sentence he'd given a week earlier to a tobacco farmer who paralyzed the National Mall in a protracted tractor-driving protest over federal agriculture policy.

A.J. Kramer, a public defender representing defendant Dwight Ware Watson, said the North Carolinian's "release is imminent" after U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson substantially shortened Watson's sentence.

Watson had been convicted earlier of making a false threat to detonate explosives and destruction of federal property. On June 23, Jackson sentenced him to six years, telling him "the city regarded you as a one-man weapon of mass destruction."

On March 17, 2003, Watson had driven his tractor into a shallow area of the mall just west of the Washington Monument. For the next 47 hours he sat there, claiming to have "organophosphate bombs" in a metal box attached to a flatbed trailer that he towed to the scene.

The day after Jackson gave Watson the six-year sentence, the Supreme Court ruled that only juries — not judges — could lengthen prison terms beyond the maximum set forth in state guidelines. Although the high court decision applied only to the state of Washington, Jackson felt that what he did in sentencing Watson was wrong.

"The Supreme Court has told me that what I did a week ago was plainly illegal," he said in court Wednesday as Watson sat quietly.

Watson had already served some 15 months in jail at the time of his sentencing on June 23. So by reducing the sentence from six years to 16 months, the judge virtually wiped it out.

During a February hearing, Watson apologized. He also recounted a jailhouse conversation he had with a federal probation officer after his conviction.

"I told her I was here to start a revolution on behalf of tobacco farming families," said Watson, who contends that changes in U.S. tobacco policy over the past two decades ruined him financially.

For more than a century, his family farm grew tobacco on as 1,500 acres of North Carolina farmland. At the time of his arrest, Watson was farming just a few dozen acres and was threatened with foreclosure.

By Derrill Holly