It wasn't extenuating circumstances or sympathy. In the judges opinion, it would be cruel and unusual punishment to apply a mandatory minimum from a terrorism statute to a non terrorist brush fire. Mandatory minimums are just a statute and do not Trump common law or the Constitution.

The feds are just trying to get the ranchers off the land to use their environmental impacts for Chinese companies to build solar power plants and funnel money to Harry Reid and Obama's cronies as corporate welfare for politically correct green power industry. My tariff on China will force American companies to build any power plants and the socialists and their cronies won't be able to skim off the top. Plus without the corporate welfare tax credits the green power industry gets and without government help in forcing ranchers off their land, these solar plants would have to pay their true costs and not externalize these costs to the public, so they most likely will never be built.

At minimum, even you'd have to agree that the charges against the Hammonds were Trumped up.