Just how rare is it for corporations to face criminal charges for violating the Endangered Species Act?

We tried to answer that question last month when we wrote a story about Kauai’s electric cooperative being indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly causing the deaths of rare seabirds. We spoke with a local environmental attorney, a national expert in bird-powerline interaction and Kauai Island Utility Cooperative’s CEO. The consensus was that the indictment [pdf] was an uncommonly aggressive, though not unprecedented, step by the federal government.

We also put in a Freedom of Information Act request for documents [pdf] from the DOJ. We’ve finally received their response. Here it is:

Just kidding. Well, sort of.

It was a struggle to get the PDF embedded for public viewing. Multiple efforts to upload their response [pdf] to Slideshare.com yielded pages looking like a piano roll. It may be user error, or perhaps because the DOJ took steps to ensure we wouldn’t crack their redactions. They blacked out some defendants’ names and locations, saying that the information would be “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” We resorted to an old-fashioned method: scanning in a hard copy.

The short answer is that there have been only nine similar cases across the country in the past decade. Here’s the justice department’s full response (with many names still blacked out):

Before we analyze the data we can see, first some more disclaimers: A pair of information specialists in the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division had us reword our request to seek all criminal cases involving multiple violations of the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (the two laws the Kauai utility is charged with breaking).

This approach excludes those charged with a single violation — for example, a Kauai man who shot and killed a Hawaiian monk seal last year. It’s possible that by restricting ourselves to single indictments that list multiple violations, we missed some offenders. But the answer still sheds some light on our question.

The letter [pdf] we received included further caveats saying that the data “may not reflect the latest developments” in a case. And because the division lacks the resources to compare the system against case files, “we are not in a position to guarantee the accuracy of the data,” Assistant Section Chief R. Justin Smith writes.

OK, now that we have the bad news out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff.

There were 10 criminal cases involving multiple violations of the Endangered Species Act or Migratory Bird Treaty Act between Jan. 1, 2000 and June 22, 2010, including the Kauai utility case. Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama filed six indictments in less than three years while President George W. Bush filed four in his eight years in office. Dems are said to be better friends of the environment while the GOP is said to side more often with business. To be fair, it’s a small sample size and it’s not the only way to measure how much one party cares for the environment.

Three of the 10 indictments were filed during the last year of former President Bill Clinton’s second term. One of those was U.S. v. Zentner and Zentner — a case in which a Northern California consulting firm specializing in wetlands and endangered species pleaded guilty to collecting, relocating and harming the threatened red-legged frog during development of a new housing project.

Three more indictments were filed during the first year-plus of President Obama’s first term. In addition to the Kauai case, four men were charged in Washington state in March 2009 for violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and other laws. They allegedly killed and sold eagles and other birds. The feds called the sting “Operation Hanging Rock.”

In August 2009, Exxon Mobile pleaded guilty to violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act when it killed 85 birds in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming over five years by exposing them to hydrocarbons.

During the eight years President Bush spent in the White House, his justice department filed just four criminal indictments of this type. Among them were another violation of the eagle protection act — “Operation Eagle Spirit” — by two redacted entities in 2005 and a 2006 indictment of Citgo Petroleum Corporation for violating the Clean Air Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Citgo was eventually found guilty by a Texas jury in 2007.