POCATELLO - A former feedlot employee described to a federal judge watching contaminated water being pumped into the ground near Burley on the first of a two-day hearing focused on Double C Farms co-owner Cory King.

A jury in April found King guilty of four counts of injecting fluids into an underground aquifer without a permit, as well as one count of making a false statement to investigators.

Now, as part of preparation for his sentencing, lawyers on both sides are meeting before U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill to debate just what those fluids were.

King's federal indictment originally alleged the fluids were contaminated wastewater, but the issue was later kept out of the April trial.

On Monday, prosecutors finally made their case for the waste, capping a string of witnesses with Shawn Carson, a former Double C employee who alerted state inspectors to the injection wells and has since become caught up in state-level lawsuits with the feedlot owners.

Carson said he'd been aware of injections at at least one well since he started full-time at Double C around 1993. Used as a way to prevent possible flooding in nearby Willow Creek, one well in particular also allegedly sucked up wastewater from other facilities during the wet spring of 2005, he said. He described watching polluted water flow through a ditch to a junction area near the siphoning well.

"I knew that that well was taking that water and those contaminants at that time," Carson said.

Prosecutors may have to work to swing the judge their way. Outside of Carson and similar testimony from a former Idaho Department of Water Resources employee, they focused much of their time on the process used to test a sample of Willow Creek water nearly one month after King stopped injecting water in June 2005.

The water at that time showed some presence of E. coli bacteria and exceeded drinking-water standards for total coliform, according to a statement filed by Stephanie Harris, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's lead regional microbiologist and a witness on Monday. But prosecutors could not show the state of the water during the injections, and only Carson confirmed for them that irrigation diversions from the creek had allegedly once been used before as drinking water.

King's lawyers attacked the competence and credibility of the scientists who gathered and tested the water, and presumably will continue to attempt to portray Carson as an upset and irresponsible ex-employee when cross-examination resumes today.

They will also present their own witnesses sometime during the hearing, which starts at 9 a.m.