Ruby Ridge - Aftermath

Aftermath

Both the internal 1994 Ruby Ridge Task Force Report and the public 1995 Senate subcommittee report on Ruby Ridge criticized the rules of engagement as unconstitutional. A 1995 GAO report on use of force by federal law enforcement agencies stated: "In October 1995, Treasury and Justice adopted use of deadly force policies to standardize the various policies their component agencies had adopted over the years." The major change was the requirement of a reasonable belief of an "imminent" danger of death or serious physical injury, which brought all federal LEA deadly force policies in line with US Supreme Court rulings (Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1, 18 (1985) and Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989)) that applied to state and local LE agencies.

The surviving members of the Weaver family filed a wrongful death suit. To avoid trial and a possibly higher settlement, the federal government awarded Randy Weaver a $100,000 settlement and his three daughters $1 million each in August 1995. In the out-of-court settlement, the government did not admit any wrongdoing in the deaths of Sammy and Vicki Weaver.

FBI director Louis Freeh disciplined or proposed discipline for twelve FBI employees over their handling of the incident and the later prosecution of Randy Weaver and Harris. He described it before the U.S. Senate hearing investigating the incident as "synonymous with the exaggerated application of federal law enforcement" and stated "law enforcement overreacted at Ruby Ridge."

A CBS miniseries about the Ruby Ridge incident, entitled Ruby Ridge: An American Tragedy, aired on May 19 and May 21, 1996. It was based on the book Every Knee Shall Bow by reporter Jess Walter and starred Laura Dern as Vicki, Kirsten Dunst as Sara, and Randy Quaid as Randy. The TV series was edited together in movie form as The Siege at Ruby Ridge.

FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi was indicted for manslaughter in 1997 by the Boundary County, Idaho, prosecutor just before the statute of limitations for the crime of manslaughter expired, but the trial was removed to federal court and quickly dismissed on grounds of sovereign immunity. The decision to dismiss the charges was reversed by an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit, which held that enough uncertainty about the facts of the case existed for Horiuchi to stand trial on state manslaughter charges. Ultimately, the then-sitting Boundary County Prosecutor, Brett Benson, who had defeated Woodbury in the 2000 election, decided to drop the charges because he felt it was unlikely the state could prove the case and too much time had passed. Yagman, the special prosecutor, responded that he "could not disagree more with this decision than I do."

Kevin Harris was also indicted for the first-degree murder of DUSM Bill Degan, but the charge was dismissed on grounds of double jeopardy because he had been acquitted in the federal criminal trial on the same charge in 1993.

Randy and Sara Weaver wrote a 1998 paperback book, The Federal Siege at Ruby Ridge, about the incident (the appendix of the book is a reprint of the 1995 Report on the U.S. Senate Ruby Ridge Hearing).

The attorney for Kevin Harris pressed Harris's civil suit for damages, although federal officials vowed they would never pay someone who had killed a U.S. Marshal. In September 2000, after persistent appeals, Harris was awarded a $380,000 settlement from the government.

The Weaver family, including Randy, later moved to Kalispell, Montana, where Sara and the other two Weaver daughters are employed. After becoming a born-again Christian, Sara Weaver said in 2012 that she had forgiven the federal agents who killed her mother and brother.