Biography
Peggy Sue McRae participated in the Cove–Mallard forest-defense campaign. She was jailed in Idaho in 1994 after refusing to pay restitution to the contractor building the logging road.
Birth-year source
- High Country News, 1996 — identifies Cove/Mallard activist Peggy Sue McRae as 44, supporting 1952 as her birth year.
Photograph source
In a statement published by the Cove/Mallard Coalition, McRae said that she had accepted an Alford plea while denying guilt and described the threatened underlying felony as conspiracy to commit grand theft for taking the Noble Road. She explained her refusal to pay restitution to Highland Enterprises. Mike Roselle’s column calls the sentencing judge “Rienhart” and describes a temporary transfer with Jennifer Prichard to Clearwater County Jail. These details do not establish an exact physical release date, and the column’s relative chronology is not used to replace the existing July 7 sentencing date.
Earth First! Journal, August 1, 1994, PDF pages 10, 24 (printed pages 9, 23).
In her first-person August1995 account, McRae identifies the Spud Seven summer1993 Noble Road blockade and says they were initially held in jail for twenty days. The Idaho Supreme Court's August27,1999 Highland Enterprises v.Barker factual background individually names Peggy Sue McRae as tripod-sitting and arrested by the Idaho County Sheriff's Department on July15,1993. The exact arrest day is independently corroborated, not borrowed from a collective event. This establishes an earlier actual jail phase, distinct from her separately recorded July1994 return for refusing restitution. The twenty days are an initial documented subtotal; the plea offer of ten more days does not prove additional completed service or an exact release. Admission is known only to1993, and the full custody interval remains unknown.
McRae retrospectively says that in the previous summer she returned to court for refusing restitution and chose to spend two months in the Grangeville jail, the remainder of her suspended sentence. The editors separately identify the four essayists as having actually spent jail time. This supports attributed actual two-month prose for the existing1994 restitution phase. It does not establish an exact release day or authorize replacing the existing nominal sixty-one-day sentence with an exact actual-day count. Current1994 dates and numeric counters are preserved.
