BACK TO 1972 OPENING DAY

[Stan Hillis]

Originally Posted by John Dallas

My point was that leaning a gun against the outside of the vehicle is defined as "in"

Are you kidding? How in the world can a gun outside a vehicle be in it? Some of the rulings on laws, that I hear about, are stupid to the extreme.

If that's really true it reminds me of a court case here years ago in which a dove shooting buddy of mine, and country lawyer, defended an entire field full of shooters who were charged with shooting over bait. The field in question was a large field which had been planted in it's entirety in alternating strips of corn and sunflowers, which ran the full length of the field. When preparing the field the owner had bush-hogged lanes through some of the strips of both corn and sunflowers. As a rotary mower will do, it slung some of the corn into the rows of standing sunflowers and some of the sunflowers into the rows of standing corn. This is, of course, legal in every way.

When the federal game warden presented his case he said that each four-row wide strip of corn and sunflowers constituted a separate "field", and that because there was sunflowers in the corn "fields" and corn in the sunflower "fields" they were baited.

My friend looked at the judge and said he rested his case, at which point the judge berated the warden for wasting the court's time and threw the case out, or at the very least found all the defendants not guilty.

[J. A. EARLY]

A couple of decades ago four of us were goose hunting on the last day, having a spectacular shoot with the bag limit set at five. Here comes the game warden right to our blind as the geese are still coming in trying to land and we are not near our limit. He stands there interrupting our hunt and after counting geese asks for our licenses. My buddy who had moved from Texas and had not been goose hunting for years had purchased his duck stamp the day before. Of course he forgot to sign it. In the warden's pocket it went. He took my license and looked at it and into his pocket it went. We were both issued tickets for unsigned Duck Stamps. I protested that my signature was right there on the stamp. He replied that I had signed it at the bottom and it was supposed to be across the middle. The instructions say to sign it on the face. That means the front, and no particular spot is designated. It did not matter to him.

The day of the trial my buddy and I both took off from work. I knew the Commonwealths Attorney and explained to him that there is no designated space to sign it and it was signed. We also argued that since it was the last day of the season and the stamp had been purchased the day before, and the warden ruined our hunt so there was no way he could pass it on to someone else, the C.A. agreed to drop the cases.

When the case was called I also knew the judge and after the C.A. advised him that the Commonwealth was dropping the case, it was dismissed. Smoke flew out of the warden's ears. The next year the warden found himself in the far reaches of south western Virginia to deal with the mountain folks, far away from us. We were not his only victims of useless charges it seems.