Opinion: The Diesel Brothers Did Nothing Wrong

Earlier this month, David “Heavy D” Sparks was sent to prison over failure to pay nearly $850,000 in fees tied to an environmental lawsuit targeting the Diesel Brothers. He was released last week and has slowly been giving his side of the story. But it’s hard to condemn him after learning that those weren’t actually criminal fines he had yet to pay.

The money Sparks has allegedly refused to pay have been confirmed as legal fees tied to the civil suit launched against the former Discovery Channel and current YouTube host. These aren’t emissions fines.

Keep in mind that it wasn’t even the state that went after Heavy D and the Diesel Brothers, it was Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment (UPHE) and its legal team launching a lawsuit over allegations that the Diesel Brothers had violated the Clean Air Act by illegally conducting emissions-deletes on diesel vehicles.

Having been ordered to be released by another judge after being imprisoned for three days, Sparks took to Instagram to give a short explanation about what happened. This was followed by a video that he released on his personal YouTube channel.

In the clip, he claims to have been vindicated. But he also issues a challenge to the UPHE, naming lawyer Reed Zars and Dr. Brian Monk specifically, by saying that they had “crossed a line you cannot un-cross.” Sparks believes the UPHE intentionally targeted, ultimately stealing his freedom, attempting to ruin his reputation, and setting a bad precedent for the nation.

Sparks has vowed to "pursue accountability” to ensure that something similar doesn’t happen to other Americans. Most of the video is a recap of the lawsuit, which started in 2017, and includes a large amount of court documents and letters between legal teams. He also spoke about the arrest and his time in jail, which he described as the single worst experience of his life.

Sparks said he was arrested by a large team of US Marshalls immediately after arriving in Utah to speak at a state summit. From there, they took him from the airport to the Salt Lake County Jail. While released several days later by a judge who condemned the arrest to begin with, Sparks asserts that his arrest was the result of a broken legal system being abused by bad actors.

Based upon his accounts of the court case and the accompanying legal documents, it really does appear that the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment was gunning for the Diesel Brothers using what was effectively lawfare. UPHE lawyer Zars undoubtedly got the heaviest criticism, however. Sparks showcases years of instances where Mr. Zars attempted to defame him over social media and then link that to the civil suit against the Diesel Brothers.

Sparks’ assessment of Zars’ legal tactics paint him as downright unsavory. However, many of the actions used by Zars are fairly well documented in the court filings and support the claims. It seems like there was nothing the lawyer wouldn’t do in an effort to dig up dirt on the Diesel Brothers — even when it yielded nothing of use to the civil suit.

But Sparks noted that Zars continued to bill the UPHE for his aggressive efforts, which is part of the nearly $850,000 the court wants him to now pay to the group. Unsurprisingly, Heavy D doesn’t want to shell over money to a lawyer that he sees as having spent the better part of a decade trying to destroy his business and defame him.

Likewise interesting is the fact that Sparks claims that the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment had said they would drop the suit early on for a large amount of money that was undisclosed by Sparks for legal reasons. This was allegedly after the Diesel Brothers already agreed to shift away from showing content where they modified diesel trucks by removing emission control devices at the UPHE’s request.

Sparks is making the claim that these kinds of suits are less about achieving emissions compliance or improving the environment than they are about enriching entities like the UPHE. He provided instances of other suits launched by the group as circumstantial evidence. This included businesses tied to the Diesel Brothers, presumably in the hopes that the added pressure would force some of those businesses to cave in to demands.

There are a few ways to view this. You can say “the law is the law” and assume the payment to the UPHE should happen because the judge said so. But you can also be critical of the original judge’s ruling, particularly since it seems to have been made on behalf of an activist organization trying to make an example of someone modifying pickup trucks.

The core case was attached to assertions that the Diesel Brothers had violated the Clean Air Act by building roughly two dozen trucks without emission controls — most of which were completed prior to 2016. Meanwhile, the UPHE’s evidence was primarily tied to studies it had commissioned and claims that the trucks had produced a surplus of air pollution, causing an estimated $115 million in environmental damages under Utah law.

Sparks' team asserts that these were show vehicles that law limited use, suggesting there was no way each truck could have created millions of dollars in environmental damages apiece. However, he stated that he wasn’t keen to bring attention to the suit as his company was trying to move away from diesel-defeating content. This was something he hinted could have been a mistake as the UPHE took the opposite approach by launching what he called a “media blitz” that lasted for years.

While the Diesel Brothers had indeed been selling a limited number of emissions-defeating devices over their website, Sparks claimed that they had stopped prior to 2016 as public pressure was mounting and regional emission laws were becoming stricter. He also said these units were not marketed as something intentionally designed to circumvent emissions. Concerned about the potential blowback. He even recalled them, offering to pay more than the units were originally sold for.

This coincides with charity work conducted by the Diesel Brothers to fix diesels with broken emissions systems that may have been cost prohibitive to low-income families and businesses. Sparks and company were clearly under pressure as pressure from environmentalists were mounting and coinciding with government undertakings. Expanding this kind of work was said to have been pitched to the UPHE in a bid for them to drop the suit, particularly because the relevant businesses hadn’t amassed more than $400,000 in profits collectively. There was no way they could pay the $115 million UPHE was asking for. However, Sparks said that the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment rejected the deal immediately.

While the court would eventually broadly agree with UPHE, the judge lowered the emission fine to just $765,344. Sparks and company would later go to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and it was decided that the Diesel Brothers were really only liable for the trucks sold and operated within Utah, lowering the emission fine even further.

But the attorney fees aren’t impacted by these types of rulings and only increased as the legal battle dragged on. Remember that the original suit was launched in 2016, with Reed Zars and other lawyers billing the UPHE the entire time and Sparks having to pay his own legal team. Based on existing laws, it was decided that the lawyers were entitled to their full fees and Sparks was still obligated to pay it.

Suggesting that he was not happy with that decision is an understatement. Sparks notes that the suit took up a large portion of his life for the better part of a decade and was costing his businesses a meaningful amount of money the entire time. But it was worth doing because ignoring the case could have meant an $115 million fine that would have totally bankrupted his company.

Sparks also noted that his business has already issued “hundreds of thousands of dollars directly to the U.S. Treasury and EPA” to satisfy the federal portion of the suit. However, he was critical in saying that he did not believe any of the money would actually go toward environmental programs or improving Utah’s air quality.

If he is to be believed, the only outstanding payments are those that pertain to the attorneys’ fees — which Sparks said were being abused by the UPHE’s lawyers to extract as much money as possible. He suggested changing the Clean Air Act so that it cannot be abused.

This whole ordeal opens up the door to right-to-repair issues, how much influence the government should have in terms of regulating private businesses, what should actually constitute illegal levels of pollution, the general nature of lawyers, how lawsuits actually work, and what role activist-led organizations should or should not play in all of the above.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is the fact that the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment receives a substantial amount of its funding, often via things like the EPA’s Environmental Justice Grants Program. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Utah Department of Health and Human Service likewise fund the UPHE. While not technically a governmental organization, it certainly seems to be funded by government agencies and just-so happens to do work on their behalf.

NGOs and their lawyers are famous for this kind of behavior in general. They technically work outside of the government, giving them leeway that federal or state agencies lack. But they often work on behalf of those same agencies (even partnering with them sometimes) and are funded via government grants that come out of your taxes. They may even help to inform governmental policy by way of lobbying efforts, providing activist-based research, public awareness campaigns designed to sway opinion, or launching target lawsuits.

Your author is inclined to believe a lot of the above applies to what happened with the UPHE in the Diesel Brothers court case. While that doesn’t make Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment the default villain in this story, it does call into question how our legal system works in general — particularly in regard to the overzealous way it handles emissions regulations and small businesses. I’m having a hard time seeing this as a simple case of something being bad for illegally modifying a few diesel trucks and having a good time.

That’s not to suggest that Sparks and the rest of the Diesel Brothers crew didn’t violate state or federal laws. I simply don’t care when the true legality of those crimes seems to hinge upon how much money or how many lawyers one can or cannot afford to throw at the problem.

Emissions laws already seem fairly arbitrary. For example, multinational conglomerates lobby endlessly for preferential treatment, the military certainly doesn't adhere to the Clean Air Act, and emissions cheating is rampant within select industries — some of which are even given exceptions. We likewise appear to have reached a point where we’re trading intangible environmental benefits for vehicles that cost more and offer less value to citizens. The fact that lawyers may come with predatory billing and laws could be biased against smaller businesses is just another layer of an already tainted cake.

[Images: Sparks Motors; HeavyDSparks/YouTube]