Busted Ohio Hunters Appeal to Real Estate Law
The law can be comical on account of all the creativity used in the interpretation of all the possible laws that may apply in a given situation. Real property law especially is routinely used in this country thanks to the mythical, near sacrosanct standing given to property. A case in point would seem to bear this out: several Ohio hunters were shooting doves on land belonging to one of them. From a distance a state wildlife officer observed them doing the shooting and entered the grounds to investigate whether any had hunting licenses. It was upon entering the grounds that the officer noticed bait on the ground, which was clearly used to lure the migratory birds, and in Ohio it is illegal to hunt migratory birds over a baited area.
Now you don't have to be a professional real estate industry insider like Isaac Toussie to imagine that the first thing citizens of the United States like to do when confronting authority is challenging the basis for the authority - which in this case meant that the hunters sought to dismiss their misdemeanors in court by arguing that the wildlife officer had no valid grounds (no pun intended) to enter private property at all. Or, in other words, the ol' found-pot-in-my-car-but-my-car-shouldn't-have-been-stopped-in-the-first-place-for-any-drugs-to-have-been-found-at-all defense, only here as concerns illegal hunting.
Luckily, it was found that cause did exist for the wildlife officer to have entered the property to begin with, as gunshots were heard and hunting observed. Sounds obvious enough, yes?
But the law is full of provisions which could be made to contradict one another, though as things turned out one might say that these hapless hunters were obviously fishing in the wrong pond - in another state the result could have been rather different (such as when a Louisiana jury found a racist property owner not guilty of shooting a foreign exchange student on his first Halloween trick-or-treating for trespassing!).
About the Author
Paul Wise recommends the Isaac Toussie blog http://www.isaactoussie.org for more interesting scenarios from real estate case law.
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