Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 4 · column 4 of 5 · from the scan, no model involved
pickup truck.
Following the arrest of his son on a charge of firing his gun within the 100-yard zone adjacent to a highway, Frank Sutton III, a commissioner of Game and Inland Fisheries, fired off a memorandum to game wardens directing them not to enforce that portion of the code. He contended that it was a part of the general law of the state and not the hunting law, and therefore it should be enforoed, if at all, by sheriffs and police officers.
But since game wardens were given general police powers a few years back, the instruction created consternation and anger among the wardens whose enforcement job was already difficult and complicated beyond belief.
After outraged protests by the wardens, law enforcement officers, citizens and, somewhat surprisingly, an affiliated organization of the National Rifle Association, the order was revoked.
Just where the head of the state agency got the idea that he could, by his own order, in effect repeal an act of the General Assembly is not clear.
Another example of the lightness with which the game laws are regarded by some in high places also occurred recently. A fortnight ago Game Commission member Frank F. Everest Jr. and 23 of his buddies were arrested and charged with allegedly hunting doves in a baited field in Prince William County. The word “hunting” is used advisedly under such circumstances. The offense is both a federal and state violation. Also bagged in the roundup were Phillip C. McGuire, assistant director of the enforcement division of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; Rep. William F. Nichols (D-Ala.); and Edward B. Burwell, president of Southern Railway.
Following the arrests, John H. McLaughlin, chief of the Game Commission’s law enforcement agency, put out a directive ordering that such charges should henceforth be brought in state rather than federal courts. Although in the past about 80 percent of the waterfowl and migratory bird violations have been prosecuted in federal courts, McLaughlin said he feared the practice might offend state judges.
Left unsaid was the fact that federal judges usually pass far stiffer penalties in such cases than do those of the state courts.
The combination of scofflaws in the fields and, it seems, in the agency of government charged with enforcing the game laws of the Commonwealth is a source of grinding frustration to the game wardens who are trying to do the job required by their oath, and to law enforcement officers generally. Both see their authority clouded by what appears to be a sort of unholy alliance between their superiors and the “good ole boy” network.
In the meanwhile the ordinary citizens using the highways, and occasionally on their own land, are glared at, cussed out and sometimes reportedly shot at by those hunters who, at this season of the year seem - with apparent justification - to feel themselves beyond the law of man or nature. '
82.8%