Unfortunately I must say that this has all to often been the case here in Alabama as well. Get a ticket here and you are guilty. Period! Try to fight it even if you are in the right and you will still lose. Why? Cause the courts and judges don't care. Its a money making racket and the wardens are the cash generators. I recognize the need for game wardens and respect the work that the honest ones are trying to achieve but here in my area of Alabama we have had so many rotten apples it has dragged the general view of Game Wardens almost down to the level of child pornographers.
There have been so many cases of abuse of power. Mulitple instances where wardens have framed people they didn't like or had some personal agenda against. I know personally of one case locally where a game warden got drunk at a party and got his a$$ kicked for getting fresh with a guys girlfriend. Two weeks later the same game warden came across the truck of the guy who whipped his butt at a local boat landing. The guy was down river in his boat running his trot lines. The warden tossed a dead turkey carcass in the back of the guys truck and waited for the guy to return. When he got back to the landing the warden wrote him up for turkey hunting out of season. I know you are probably thinking, "aw come on Todd things like that are isolated cases and not the norm." Well I wish you were right. I could quote you case after case. Confiscated guns that mysteriously disappeared by the time they were supposed to be returned to the owners. Game wardens who are supposed to be catching night hunters actually doing the night hunting. (That last one goes on a lot.) I personally saw a guy written up for fishing without a license once in what was essentially an oblong mudhole in the ditch of the highway. He was just checking out another friends new rod and reel and cast it up the ditch a few times. There was no fish in this thing then or ever! It was a drainage ditch attached to no body of water. A game warden passing by pulled over checked all of us for fishing licenses (even though only one of us was holding a rod and reel) and wrote that poor guy a ticket. Think he got it thrown out of court? Think again. Like I said the courts and judges don't care here. The wardens set em up and they knock em down. Its a money racket pure and simple.
Heck I could (if any of you are interested) relate a case to you in which a local game warden in conjunction with a local cop framed a poor boy for possession of a silencer and got him sent to prison for 3 years. Why did they do it? The cop and the boy who went to prison were both courting the same girl and the cop was losing her to the other boy. So he enlisted the help of one of our fine upstanding local game wardens to help plant and bust the boy for possession of a silencer. They got that guy sent to prison for 3 years over a woman. The state eventually reassigned both of those gentlemen to other areas for their own safety as this episode had stirred up the locals pretty bad.
Sorry for the long rant. Just be glad if you have good game wardens in your area. Getting checked in your tree stand and not even getting a ticket. Ha, count yourself lucky. If that had been an Alabama game warden he would have probably dragged the body of a dead hobo under your tree and framed you for murder. That is, if your wife is hot and he thought he had a shot at her while you were in prison. Count your blessings.