Barry Beach--Montana Needs to Clear the Air

The air in Big Sky country is not clean: Montana is in the news again.

Governor Brian Schweitzer signed a gun bill exempting Montanans who purchase guns made in Montana, and with the intention of keeping them solely in Montana, from any background check, federal firearms registration and dealer licensing requirements as long as no state lines are crosses. Once again Montana is flexing its sovereign muscle while thumbing its nose at the rest of the country.

Those who drafted the law desire a showdown. They want the fight for sovereign rights to roll all the way to the Supreme Court. Good luck with that. For all the energy being funneled in to ramping up the I-Want-My-Own-Gun-On-My-Own-Terms fight, one would think Montana has all its ducks in a row. But it doesn´t. Montana is using up valuable energy and resources to pick a fight when it has not even begun to clean up some of its messes from the past. For as dusty and tough as the Montana frontier might seem, Montana will not engage in the fight to save a man´s life.

While Governor Schweitzer is dodging and parrying with the GOP over stimulus allotments, and launching future Supreme Court nonsense, Barry Beach still languishes in prison for a crime reportedly he did not commit. What about putting some backbone into that?

Centurion Ministries is waiting for some word, any word, from the Montana Supreme Court regarding documents filed on Barry´s behalf. Montanans for Justice have been active in Helena getting the word out to citizens regarding Barry´s plight. Blogs and letters online remain hopeful but the wheels of justice seem to have ground to an unceremonious halt. All the while, an innocent man watches his life slip away in the celled society he never asked for, and never wanted.

Barry Beach has become Montana´s Poster Boy for Wrongful Prosecution. Former Governor Marc Racicot sent him to the big house when he acted as the prosecuting attorney in Kim Nees´ murder trial. Racicot climbed the political ladder using Barry as one of his ascending rungs, complete with a coerced confession, no physical evidence and a hefty dollop of prestidigitation. Follow that up with years of cover-ups over the blatantly botched investigation by three different law enforcement agencies who could not investigate themselves out of a perforated paper sack.

The alleged perpetrators who have periodically confessed to killing Kim Nees that horrible night in Poplar, Montana, still roam free, courtesy of their nepotistic connections to local law enforcement who jacked up the investigation to protect their own. Cowards all, they blog each other on Montanans for Justice website, passing remarks, making accusations, pointing fingers. They confess to folks who were not even alive when the murder occurred. And they breathe the air of freedom that Barry Beach has been denied so long.

Montana, when are you going to do the right thing? The Kim Nees case is a travesty of justice, rife with suspicion, tampering of evidence and cover-ups that traveled all the way from Poplar to former Governor Racicot´s office. Now is the time for Attorney General Steve Bullock to take a good hard look and dig up the real truth. The truth that Barry Beach, at the very least, deserves a new trial.

No, the air is not clear in Montana as spring turns into summer.

When justice remains elusive, the stench of a rat permeates the air.