. >> the thing that seems to upset judge battey the most is not whether he's fair, but that he's beingy denied that motion. >> i knew this case was going to trial the day the hugh o'gara article was published in the "rapid city journal." ♪ ♪ >> i'm not afraid of 12 people, a jury of 12 people of our peers. i know that they'll look at this case and they'll see the ridiculous way in which the government is behaving and they will vindicate us. we're innocent of all the things that we're charged with. >> so in the courtroom, of course, right in front, is judge battey on the bench. off to the left is the jury, 12 jurors, 2 alternates. a large space in between where the lawyers get to pace and walk and show exhibits and things. and then we had the prosecution, which at times had two or three lawyers. on our side, there was a lawyer for each defendant, so there were six lawyers, and five defendants. the sixth defendant, of course, being the black hills institute. our trial was, and still is, the largest criminal case that's ever been tried in south dakota. >> you cannot say the word "sue" in

. >> judge battey said actually in his filing that the sale was null and void. >> the federal governmentthe position that he had no authority himself to enter into an agreement with the black hills institute. >> peter realized that he could not have his fossil back. he was devastated. >> the judge decided that sue was real estate. sue the fossil was real estate. >> i first got involved in the dinosaur case, as we call it, sometime late 1992, early 1993. of course they're not going to like what we're doing. that's the nature of what we do. but hopefully in the broader spectrum, people can look at it and say, well, i'm glad people can't just go out into the forests or out on to the parks and take these fossils, or in this particular case, or steal stuff off of land, and somebody's going to do something about it. well, we're the somebody that does something about it. >> after the seizure of the sue specimen, we continued to look at this issue, not from a park service jurisdiction perspective, but more from the circumstances of business practices in terms of collecting on public lands. >> yo