<p>Raisin farmer Marvin Horne is a modern day outlaw, but he stands by his convictions.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">The 68 year old has been breaking the law for 11 years and now owes the government at least $650,000 in unpaid fines and 1.2 million pounds of unpaid raisins, roughly equal to his entire harvest for four years, according to the Washington Post.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">All this for defying the national raisin reserve, a program created to solve a problem during the Truman administration, and never turned off.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">“I believe in America. And I believe in our Constitution. And I believe that eventually we will be proved right,” Horne said recently, sitting in an office next to 20 acres of ripening Thompson grapes. “They took our raisins and didn’t pay us for them.”<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">During any given season, the government may decide that farmers are growing more raisins than Americans will consume, causing supply to outstrip demand and a drop in raisin prices. To prevent that, the government takes away a percentage of every farmer’s raisins. Often, without paying for them.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">The raisins are put into a government-controlled “reserve” and kept off U.S. markets. In theory, that lowers the available supply of raisins and thereby increases the price for farmers’ raisin crops –at least, the part of their crops that the government didn’t seize.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">When Horne’s case reached the Supreme Court this spring, Justice Elena Kagan wondered whether it might be “just the world’s most outdated law.”<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">“Your raisins or your life, right?” joked Justice Antonin Scalia.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">The Supreme Court issued its ruling last month and gave Horne a partial victory. A lower court had rejected Horne’s challenge of the law. Now, the justices told that court to reconsider it.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Horne has now spent a decade trying to do one of the hardest things in American politics. He is trying to kill a law, by breaking it.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">“The hell with the whole mess,” he says now. “It’s like being a serf.”<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">For now, Horne will have to wait to find out whether the courts see him as a conscientious objector to a bad law, or a modern day raisin-stealing Jessie James.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><a class="btn btn-sm btn-primary col-lg-12" style="white-space: normal;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/one-growers-grapes-of-wrath/2013/07/07/ebebcfd8-e380-11e2-80eb-3145e2994a55_story_2.html" target="_new">Raisin Report</a></p><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">
