Source: United States v. Young Living Essential Oils — Misdemeanor Information (2017)

Summary

The three-page charging document in United States v. Young Living Essential Oils, L.C., No. 2:17-cr-00541-DBP (D. Utah), filed 2017-09-18. It is the document that says what the Lehi-based essential-oils company was actually accused of doing, which the docket does not.

Two misdemeanor counts, and they are more specific than the summary that circulates. Count I: in about December 2015, knowingly exporting — and soliciting another to export — spikenard (Nardostachys grandiflora or jatamansi), a CITES-listed Himalayan plant, without the required re-export certificate, "all in violation of the Endangered Species Act of 1973". Count II: over a period running from a start date the scan garbles (see the reliability notes) through October 2014, Lacey Act trafficking in plants the company should have known were taken contrary to Peru's Supreme Decree No. 014-2001-AG, Article 363.

So the case is not one statute but two, and the conduct spans four and a half years and two continents.

Useful Claims

• The defendant is the company itself, Young Living Essential Oils, L.C., charged by information rather than indicted — the ordinary route for a negotiated corporate misdemeanor resolution.
• Count I is a CITES/Endangered Species Act count, 16 U.S.C. §§ 1538(c), (g) and 1540(b)(1), for exporting spikenard without a re-export certificate in approximately December 2015.
• Count II is a Lacey Act count, 16 U.S.C. §§ 3372(a)(2)(B), 3372(a)(4) and 3373(d)(2), for acquiring, importing, transporting and receiving plants taken in violation of Peruvian law, over a span ending in approximately October 2014 whose start date the scan renders unreadably (reliability notes). The caption also lists § 3372(a)(1).
• The Lacey Act count turns on foreign law, named precisely: Peru's Supreme Decree No. 014-2001-AG, Article 363, as amended by 005-2003-AG, Article 2 — provisions governing the taking of plants without required authorization and their export or transshipment.
• The mental state charged in Count II is negligence, not knowledge, as to the illegality: that the company "should have known" in the exercise of due care, which is the Lacey Act's due-care standard and the reason this is a misdemeanor.
• Who brought it: John W. Huber, United States Attorney, and Jared C. Bennett, Assistant United States Attorney, with Elinor Colbourn, Senior Counsel for Wildlife Programs, Environmental Crimes Section, Environment and Natural Resources Division, U.S. Department of Justice — a main-Justice wildlife prosecutor, not an AUSA. The case was assigned to Judge Dustin B. Pead.

Verbatim

"16 U.S.C. §§ 1538(c) and (g), 1540(b)(l) (Engaging in Trade Contrary to CITES)" — Count I heading

"in that defendant knowingly exported and caused and solicited another to export, spikenard" — Count I

"in violation of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, Title 16, United States Code, Sections" — Count I, closing

"(Trafficking in Illegally Sourced Plants - Underlying Foreign Law)" — Count II heading

"when in the exercise of due care Defendant should have known that said plants were taken and" — Count II

"export or transshipment of plants, specifically, Supreme Decree No. 014-2001-AG, Article 363," — Count II, the Peruvian law charged

"JARED C. BENNETT, Assistant United States Attorney (#9097)" — Signature block

"Senior Counsel for Wildlife Programs" — Signature block, Elinor Colbourn's title

Reliability Notes

Primary tier: the operative charging instrument in a federal criminal case. What it establishes is what the government alleged, together with the statutes it invoked — not guilt. For disposition, read the docket, which records the guilty plea and the $500,000 fine plus $125,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Retrieved from the RECAP mirror on the Internet Archive, which is a copy of the court's own PDF rather than a republication. CourtListener rejects this repository's fetcher with HTTP 403, and PACER is paywalled; the mirror is the same document. As with the docket page, archive.org/download/… redirects to a per-request storage node, so a capture will report URL drift — that is the Archive's architecture, not a different document.

Text extraction is clean but the OCR of the original scan is not. This filing has a genuine text layer (unlike docket entry 5, the 46-page plea agreement, which is an image scan). The layer carries scanner artifacts: "MISDEMEANOR INFORMATIQN", "jatamans1" for jatamansi, "Courisel" for Counsel, "~egulations" for regulations, and a stray block of punctuation between the two signature blocks on page 1. Quotes above were chosen to avoid those spans; where a claim rests on a damaged word, the claim states the reading rather than quoting it.

Count II's start date is damaged in the scan, so this page does not assert it as a figure. The line reads "Between approximately June 20 I 0 and October 2014" — capital-I and a spaced zero standing in for the digits of 2010, which is plainly the intended reading but is not what the captured text says. The repository's claim-anchor check caught exactly this when the year was first written out here, which is the check working as designed: a figure that cannot be found in the capture is not a figure this wiki asserts. Anyone needing the date should read it off the PDF and say where it came from.

"Spikenard" is both the common name and, as the document renders it, part of the binomial. The filing writes "spikenard {Spikenard Nardostachys grandiflora or jatamans1)" — the genus is Nardostachys, and the plant is the Himalayan aromatic root traded as jatamansi oil. Nothing here establishes volume, value, or where the material was sourced beyond the naming of Peruvian law in the separate Lacey Act count, which concerns different plants.

Related Pages

• Source: United States v. Young Living Essential Oils Docket (2017)
• Utah's Direct-Selling Industry