Never have understood why a landowner needs a license to hunt and fish on his own land.
Fantastic ruling. It has been a long time coming.
-PJ
It’s called trespass...pure and simple. Why did it even go to court?
Land rights are sketchy at best... And governments have rights to go on your property. It’s sad and infuriating, but true and when and if this is appealed to a higher court and ultimately to the Supreme Court, the state will eventually win.
“ Under the “open-fields doctrine,” Supreme Court precedent dating back to Prohibition holds that undeveloped land on someone’s property lacks the same rigorous Fourth Amendment protections as their home and the “curtilage,” the area immediately surrounding the home.”
Revenuers needed to find those whiskey stills. Bad policy makes bad law. They created a doctrine solely to find a way to catch moonshiners.
Give them an inch...Why not plant microphones on the property as well? Sure the FBI would like to know what’s being said so they can plan a little “visit.” The law itself sounds like a violation of the 4th, but it’s no surprise given the proliferation of so-called “red flag” laws..
I know someone that works for a State transportation agency in the Northeast. During COVID they allowed employees to work from home. This person has a particularly nasty boss, I know the boss and this is a nasty character. The boss prompted the Inspector General to investigate the person working from home. At this time the women working from home was on paternity leave and was called in for an interrogation WHILE on maternity leave. Long story short, the interrogation didn’t go well, imagine that.
Sometime later the husband of the women working at home is in the front yard and notices a camera on the telephone pole in front of their house. They have two small children and their first fear was that this might be some pervert, so they call the County Sheriff (rural area). Sheriff says: “That is not us, but I have seen this before, it’s your employer.”
The legality of this has never really been challenged in term of civil rights. There is also the consideration of whether the telephone pole is in the “public right-of-way” (adjacent to the road) or is the pole on private property where the utilities have easement to enter onto the property to maintain the pole.
Anyway, people should know this is being normalized.
You could grab the cameras and sell them on eBay. They were abandoned on my property, so I took them.
Maybe set up a few bear traps lol
State and especially federal agants should not be able to tresspass on private property just because they feel like it.