NEAH BAY — A pretrial conference for five whale hunters has been postponed for up to two months in Makah Tribal Court, according to one attorney involved in the case.
At Tuesday’s session, tribal charges against the men would have been dropped if a plea bargain in federal court had not turned into a fiasco on Monday.
Wayne Johnson, captain of the botched whale hunt Sept. 8 off Seal Rock in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, was one of the five who refused to plead guilty to one count of breaking the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
In exchange for the plea, the five Makah men would have received no jail time, and a second charge of conspiring to violate the marine mammal act would have been dropped.
The men — Johnson, Andy Noel, Theron Parker, Frankie Gonzales and William Secor Sr., all of Neah Bay — harpooned and shot the whale, which floated wounded for 9½ hours before it died and sank.
Johnson said Tuesday that the tribal pretrial conference had been continued, and Jack Fiander, Johnson’s defense attorney in the Makah case, said the delay could last 60 days.
