John Moore Jr. frees a shark.
(U.S. Department of Justice photo)
John Moore Jr. & Tanner Mansell released 19 hooked sharks & two goliath groupers
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida––John Moore Jr., 59, and Tanner Mansell, 32, were on May 28, 2025 presidentially pardoned for committing shark rescue.
Among the presidential record 1,600-odd pardons and commutations of criminal sentences issued by Donald Trump during his first four months in office, Moore and Mansell were perhaps the first two who were neither affluent nor influential Trumpists convicted of either fraud or corruption in public office, nor were participants in the January 6, 2021 pro-Trump rioting in Washington D.C., did not disrupt operations at an abortion clinic, and had no other criminal convictions.
Moore and Mansell were, however, high-profile victims of what even two judges of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals believed was “prosecutorial overreach,” the pretext Trump has repeatedly used in corruption cases involving his donors and supporters, and in describing his own 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Not “shark huggers” or “sea hippies”
Moore and Mansell, believing they were following the law, on August 10, 2020 freed 19 sharks and two goliath groupers from three miles of monofilament fishing line, thinking the fish were victims of maritime poachers.
Moore and Mansell were not animal rights activists, though Mansell, Palm Beach Post public safety and criminal justice reporter Hannah Phillips wrote in 2003, has “traveled the globe to help rebuild shark populations in communities where shark finning has depleted it.”
Moore, according to Phillips, “wasn’t a ‘shark hugger’ or a sea hippie,” either.
But both Moore and Mansell are shark divers: guides who take recreational divers out in boats from the Florida coast to scuba dive and watch sharks.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Jug lines” or “ghost sets”
Three miles off Jupiter Inlet on August 10, 2020, guiding a diving party that included a police chief and his family, Moore and Mansell discovered an orange floating buoy.
“Moore told the six tourists aboard his boat that he’d seen setups like these in Hawaii,” wrote Phillips. “Jug lines or ‘ghost sets,’ he called them, thrown overboard to kill sharks who might otherwise steal a fisherman’s catch.”
Moore, Mansell, the police chief and his family for the next two hours hauled in the line attached to the buoy, freeing mostly hammerhead and tiger sharks, photographing everything as potential evidence for a poaching prosecution.
A call to the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission brought only a delayed response. By the time Florida Wildlife Conservation officer Barry Partelow arrived, Phillips narrated, Moore and Mansell had “three miles of fishing line heaped on the floor of the boat,” with “140 circle hooks, 140 longline clips, and pink weights.”
John Moore Jr. & others unload longline.
(Florida Southern District Court photo)
“Didn’t know what he was looking at”
Summarized Phillips, “Partelow wrote in his incident report that he didn’t know what he was looking at, and he had patrol duties to attend to. He asked Moore to hold on to the longline, but Moore declined; he had another dive expedition beginning soon.”
Partelow agreed that Moore could leave the longline temporarily on the dock.
Mansell was “still on the water, pulling in more of the longline” two hours later, when Partelow informed him that the line was legally set, belonging to Richard Osburn of Fort Pierce, “the last federally permitted shark fisherman in the South Atlantic,” according to Phillips.
Osburn had already discovered and reported that his line had been cut. A local blogger had already posted to Instagram a photo of the line, hooks, clips, and gear on the dock.
(Florida Southern District Court photo)
“Photo went viral”
“The photo went viral,” recounted Phillips. “It ruptured an already tenuous relationship between the local fishing and shark-diving industries and prompted Scott Taylor, captain of the boat to which the longline belonged, to call a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration investigator and seek criminal charges.”
Fishers complaining of being regulated “nearly out of existence,” and unhappy about alleged shark proliferation since many shark species have been federally protected as threatened or endangered, soon demanded prosecution of the “vigilantes.”
Eventually, Phillips continued, after Moore and Mansell were convicted of theft at a jury trial, “U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks sentenced the pair to one year of probation each, and ordered them to pay $3,345 in restitution” to Osburn.
Inspector Javert, from original edition of Les Misérables. (Wikipedia)
Inspector Javert
“Though spared from prison,” Phillips explained, “their convictions made them felons, unable to vote, own firearms or freely travel abroad.”
Moore and Mansell unsuccessfully appealed, but appellate judge Barbara Lagoa compared the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Watts-Fitzgerald, to “Inspector Javert — the relentless lawman from Les Misérables who pursued a man for decades over the theft of a single loaf of bread,” Phillips recalled.
Wrote Lagoa, Moore and Mansell “are the only felons I have ever encountered, in eighteen years on the bench and three years as a federal prosecutor, who called law enforcement to report what they were seeing and what actions they were taking in real time.”
Ric O’Barry as Flipper trainer, 1960s.
Two semi-precedents
ANIMALS 24-7, however, immediately recalled two semi-precedents.
Former Miami Seaquarium and Hollywood dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry, then known as Richard Feldman, tried unsuccessfully on Earth Day 1970 to free a dolphin named Charlie Brown from a laboratory in the Bahamas.
Opening a gap in the sea pen that held Charlie Brown, O’Barry gave the dolphin the chance to escape, but the dolphin did not want to go.
O’Barry, formerly Feldman, then turned himself in to the Bahamian police, who did not know what to charge him with and therefore let him go.
Nearly eight years later, on May 29, 1977, former researchers Ken LeVasseur and Steve Sipman released two dolphins, Puka and Kea, into the ocean from the University of Hawaii’s Marine Mammal Laboratory, called police, and awaited their arrests.
Both LeVasseur and Sipman eventually did community service sentences.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Fisher killed as many as 70 dolphins
Moore and Mansell were pardoned a week after licensed charter and commercial fishing captain Zackery Brandon Barfield, 31, of Panama City, Florida, was on May 21, 2025 sentenced to serve 30 days in prison and pay a fine of $51,000 for shooting and poisoning as many as 70 bottlenose dolphins he believed were interfering with his catches.
“In 2023,” a National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration media release recounted, “a NOAA Fisheries special agent received a tip that a fisherman was killing bottlenose dolphins. This led to a 2-year investigation in coordination with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
“In 2022 and 2023,” NOAA said, “Barfield repeatedly shot dolphins and fed them poison-wrapped baitfish from his fishing vessel and an additional charter vessel, on a combination of commercial and charter trips. Our investigation revealed that Barfield shot at least five dolphins with a 12-gauge shotgun, with one confirmed death. One of the shootings occurred on a charter vessel with multiple witnesses on board.
Beth & Merritt Clifton with friends.
“Based on evidence obtained in the course of the investigation,” the NOAA release continued, “Barfield fed an estimated 24–70 dolphins poison-laden baitfish on charter trips that he captained. Barfield stated he was ‘frustrated with dolphins stealing his catch.’”
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