The era's two hardest cases came after Backfire. Eric McDavid was convicted in 2007 of conspiring to damage federal facilities in a plot developed around "Anna," a paid teenage FBI infiltrator who supplied the money, cabin, recipes, and relentless encouragement; sentenced to nearly twenty years, he was freed in 2015 when the government admitted withholding thousands of pages of evidence about her role — nine years for a crime that existed, his defenders argued, only in the FBI's script.
Marius Mason, an ELF saboteur who pleaded guilty to the 1999 Michigan State University GMO-lab arson and other property actions, received almost 22 years in 2009 — the longest ELF sentence ever imposed — with a terrorism enhancement, and as a transgender man in federal custody became a central figure of both the eco-prisoner and trans-prisoner support movements. He was released to home confinement in 2024–25 at the sentence's end phase, the last of the classic ELF prisoners.