ORIGINAL: Mocha Java
jf5:
He could look at the license that hangs on your back. IMHO, that's equivalent to a cop running your license plates while you are driving. Search and seizure are not implicated unless he pulls you over.
If you drive without a license you may get arrested, but if the stop was made without probable cause you will not be convicted. In fact, you will have a cause of action against the cop.
Regular police do a good job without the crutch of suspicionless stops. I suspect that when the PGC finally gets taken to court on this one (by someone with money), that they will also do a good enough job without that crutch.
Some of you just don’t get it. Once again I will explain that the courts have ruled that checking a hunter for a hunting license is not an unreasonable search. It isn’t that the topic has never been challenged in court, it has been. The courts have looked at the entire practice of checking hunting and fishing license and said that it is an entirely legal as well as an accepted and expected practice.
Now let’s once again take a look at what hunters could do if we didn’t check hunting license.
First off there would be no need to buy a license any more since some people have started making counterfeit license. The only way to detect that is to know what to closely look for and check the license by having it in hand.
There wouldn’t be any need to anyone to get an archery or muzzleloader license any more, at least until after you had already killed a deer and were worried about the Game Warden finding out about the kill. After all we would never be able to tell if the stamp was on the license or if it was real since we couldn’t check the license.
We would only need one license for the entire family to hunt unless more then one person was going to hunt at the same time. How would the Game Warden ever know who the license was issued to since he can’t check it?
Or, perhaps we could just get a license for everyone in the family and since they each come with a tag we could kill our buck today and grandma’s buck tomorrow and then start to hunt for one to dead Uncle Tom’s tag on. After all the Game Warden would never catch us, at least until after the deer are dead, since he can’t check our license.
But, then on the other hand why get extra license to kill more deer since all we would have to do is just keep erasing the information on the deer tag and taping it back in the license. Since the Game Warden can’t check the license there is absolutely no way he would ever detect that the tag had been used over and over again.
Talk about having no idea how many deer were being killed. If we couldn’t check license there would be almost no control over how many deer were being killed illegally. Checking the license is the first step in having even a reasonable degree of compliance with the legal harvesting of wildlife.
As far as the topic of warrant less searches of vehicles, homes or camps those things do not happen anymore and haven’t happened for a long time unless the person in control of the property gave consent to the search without a warrant.
Dick Bodenhorn
WCO, Elk County