William Ellen, lifelong conservationist, environmental consultant, and former wetlands regulator for the state of Virginia, will serve a six-month prison term for violating federal wetlands statutes. He was hired by a private landowner to create wetlands—ten duck ponds on Maryland's eastern shore—as the part-time project manager of a proposed hunting preserve and wildlife sanctuary. Ellen consulted frequently with local, state and federal officials, obtaining 38 separate permits for the project. During construction of a management complex on a piece of land previously designated as uplands, an expansion of the technical interpretation of the term "wetlands" caused confusion whether it was legal to have moved two loads of soil onto the land, which was so dry that federal safety regulations required them to hose down the dust while they worked.

John Pozsgai, a refugee of the 1956 Hungarian uprising and self-employed truck mechanic in Pennsylvania, was fined $202,000 and was sentenced to three years' imprisonment and five years' probation for hauling some 7,000 used tires and rusting car parts out of a ditch on some property he had purchased, then filling it over without a federal permit. According to Pozsgai's lawyer, it's "the longest unsuspended jail term in the history of the United States for any environmental crime, including the dumping of extremely hazardous waste and [cases] were people were even injured and killed."

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