Tag: gamekeeper

Gamekeeper’s wildlife crime conviction(s) overturned

Shooting Times has an interesting article out today (see here), claiming that Leicestershire gamekeeper Ivan Crane has had three wildlife crime convictions overturned after the appeal judge claimed the behaviour of the investigating police officer was “very underhand“.

Shooting Times reports that His Honour Judge Tony Mitchell went further with his scathing attack, saying: “I can’t think of a case which more fairly fits an abuse of power, an abuse of position, and therefore an abuse of process“.

It seems the police officer’s [supposed] mistake was not to inform Crane that he could no longer use the General Licence for trapping birds due to his two recent wildlife crime convictions. Instead, the officer took the initiative and covertly filmed a Larsen trap on Crane’s farm.

Crane’s previous wildlife crime convictions were for using an illegal pole trap and unsafe storage of pesticides (see here). He was then later convicted for unlawfully using a Larsen trap (see here), which seems to have been the catalyst to launch his appeal.

Local newspapers (eg. Lutterworth Mail) also seem to be running the story but the actual article appears to be currently unavailable on the web (google it and see if you can find it). One of the headlines (that is accessible) suggests that the Judge has ordered the Crown Prosecution Service to pay Crane’s legal bill of £35,000.

It’s not clear to us whether all three of Crane’s wildlife crime convictions have been overturned (as suggested by Shooting Times) or just the conviction for unlawfully using a Larsen trap.

It’s all a bit odd really. Isn’t it the General Licence user’s responsibility to understand the terms and conditions of General Licence use? It’s a specified requirement on the Scottish General Licences; perhaps not on the English ones? Since when has ignorance of the law been an acceptable defence? To put the situation in context….if someone had a driving conviction and was a disqualified driver, and then they drove their car whilst disqualified and received a second conviction, could they get that conviction overturned and their legal costs paid if they argued that the police officer hadn’t advised them that it was illegal for them to drive and the police had used ‘covert’ surveillance to catch them?

Another fine example of the difficulties faced by those trying to investigate and prosecute alleged wildlife crime offences in the UK. Their chances of success get slimmer by the day.

Glen Orchy sentencing update #2

Another delay….adjourned, again. Next hearing will be Friday (27 July).

Tick tock.

Glen Orchy poison case: sentence due today

It’s been a long time coming. A very long time. Over three years. But today is the day Tom McKellar is sentenced for possession of Carbofuran, found at his house in June 2009 during a police investigation into the poisoning of a golden eagle (see here, here, here and here).

McKellar wasn’t charged in relation to the dead eagle, just for possession of a banned pesticide, to which he pleaded guilty. There’s a lot more to this case than has previously been reported, and once sentencing has finished we’ll have a few things to say.

So what do you think his punishment will be? Six hours on the naughty step?

Wriggling out of vicarious liability?

Regular blog readers will be well aware that the concept of vicarious liability in relation to raptor persecution became enacted in Scotland on January 1st 2012 as part of the WANE Act. For new readers, some background can be found here. Vicarious liability has had its critics but until the first test case in court, nobody really knows just how strong, or weak, the new legislation will prove to be.

An interesting comment about vicarious liability was received on the blog at the end of last week; it suggests legal loopholes may be being exploited to avoid possible conviction. Given the interest in VL, we’ve decided to re-post the comment here. Thanks to Steve from OneKind for submitting it:

“Information gathered by Onekind suggests how some estate owners may try to avoid vicarious liability in the future by sending their game keepers on all the trapping and best practice courses there are going. According to our intelligence, top lawyers are being hired to travel around the country lecturing to gamekeepers on the law related to wildlife crime. Our information suggests that the idea behind this action, being taken by landowners and worked on by these top Lawyers, is that if a wildlife crime were to occur on their land by one of their keepers then the landowner can say that he put his keeper through the relevant courses and that he doesn’t know why the keeper did what he did. They hope that this will be enough to persuade the court that they were not complicit with the crime carried out on their land. Further information we have acquired tells us that a well-known land owner has been urging other landowners to take this idea on and which will probably be up and running properly within the next few months“.

I guess we’ll wait and see whether this defence is used if/when charges of vicarious liability are ever brought against anyone. It’s an interesting one because what they are allegedly proposing to do is not illegal, but its hardly in the spirit of moving towards the elimination of raptor persecution from the game-shooting industry, is it? In its defence, some will probably argue that we should all be thankful that gamekeepers are receiving such excellent training, but some may argue that some of the training is far from excellent. For example, OneKind has concerns about the adequacy of the snare training courses and suggests there may be an ulterior motive for running them (see here).

The use of legal loopholes to avoid possible conviction is a well-known tactic in many areas of crime, not just wildlife crime, although wildlife crime does have its fair share of examples. A recent one was reported in a newspaper at the beginning of July (sorry, no URL available) concerning the case of a gamekeeper on the Airlie Estate at Kirriemuir, Angus. He was accused of alleged criminal activity after the discovery of three buzzards inside a crow cage trap. However, he was acquitted after Sheriff Kevin Veal decided that the keeper was not given proper information about why he was being interviewed by an SSPCA inspector and a Tayside Police wildlife crime officer. Some lawyers are very good at their jobs.

It certainly pays to employ a professional lawyer rather than a pretend one. An employee from a very well-known organisation recently sent an email to a group (no, not us!) who publish the names of convicted gamekeepers and other wildlife criminals on their website. The email suggested that certain names should be removed from the website because the convictions were considered spent. The email explained the relevant law under which the names should be removed and went into some detail about how the law applied. The employee signed off with an impressive number of letters after their name, including LLB (a law degree). Uncannily, the information that the impressively-qualified employee wrote about this particular law bore an incredibly close resemblance to a Wikipedia entry on the same subject. Hmm, not quite so impressive now!

Gamekeeper convicted after trapped buzzard starved to death

Following the post we wrote on 31 May 2012 (see here), another Scottish gamekeeper has been convicted of a wildlife crime offence, this time for allowing a buzzard to starve to death inside a crow cage trap.

Jonathan Smith Graham (30), a gamekeeper on Glen Lyon Estate in Perthshire (see here), pleaded guilty to using a crow cage trap in which a buzzard was trapped and then starved to death. He has been fined £450 which is pretty pathetic when you consider the scope of available penalties (up to £5,000 &/or 6 months in prison), but perhaps more importantly he has now been banned from operating a crow cage trap for five years. Sheriff McCreadie’s comments about Graham’s actions (and in-actions) were also greatly encouraging and are welcomed. Credit to Tayside Police for undertaking the investigation on their own initiative and to wildlife fiscal Shona McJannett for a successful prosecution.

For the details of this case see here, here and here.

Some questions:

1. Will Jonathan Smith Graham be sacked from his gamekeeper job at Glen Lyon Estate now he has a wildlife crime conviction? Ask them directly: sally@glenlyonestate.co.uk

2. Was he/is he a member of the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association? (His defence lawyer was David McKie – the SGA’s solicitor – just coincidence?). If he is a member, will he be expelled now he has a wildlife crime conviction? Ask them directly: info@scottishgamekeepers.co.uk and while you’re there, ask them if they’re ready to say yet whether convicted gamekeeper Robert Christie (Lindertis Estate) is/was a member (see here).

3. Why hasn’t the SGA issued a public statement condemning the actions of this gamekeeper? Ask them directly: info@scottishgamekeepers.co.uk

4. Is Glen Lyon Estate a member of Scottish Land and Estates? Ask them directly: info@scottishlandandestates@co.uk

Would jubilee’ve it: hen harriers finished in England?

We’ve been hearing rumours that the last remaining pair of hen harriers attempting to breed in England have now failed. We don’t yet have confirmation but several (usually reliable) sources are telling us the same thing.

In a recent BBC news article (here), a spokesman from the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation said:

“We are unaware of any instance of human interference with hen harriers in England in recent years“.

Yeah, of course you are. Just like Bashar al-Assad is unaware of any instance of government troops massacring the Syrian people?

So, while the country celebrates ’60 glorious years’, take a moment to reflect on the effects of 60 years of raptor persecution.

Inadmissable evidence: double standards for wildlife crime offences?

In February we blogged about the Crown Office & Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) decision not to accept the video evidence showing a head gamekeeper apparently bludgeoning crows to death with a stick inside a crow cage trap on a Scottish sporting estate (see here). The video had been filmed by a field officer from the charity OneKind who, by chance, happened to be in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on your view).

OneKind appealed against the COPFS decision not to initiate court proceedings against the gamekeeper but the Lord Advocate ruled that the COPFS decision would stand. In response, OneKind submitted a petition to the Scottish Government, signed by over 2,000 members of the public who were disgusted by what they’d seen in the video. OneKind asked the Scottish Environment Minister, Stewart Stevenson, for greater clarity on what is / isn’t considered admissable evidence in wildlife crime cases.

Here’s his reply:

“….the Scottish Government believes it is vital to all our efforts in tackling wildlife crime, for members of the public who come across anything suspicious to report what they have seen to the police.

I would however note that there is a difference between cases where members of the public come across evidence that seems to point to a wildlife crime, and those cases where a person who is employed as, or is acting in some capacity as, a wildlife crime investigator, reports such evidence. It is for the Crown Office to decide on how a court would deal with evidence in either of those cases, and their decision on whether to prosecute a case is final”.

See here for the full update on the crow-killing incident provided by OneKind.

So, what have we learned? If you’re a member of the public who doesn’t really know what you’re looking at, or how to record evidence that might be crucial in a subsequent prosecution, then your ‘evidence’ will probably be admissable. However, if you’re someone who knows exactly what you’re looking at and has been trained in the best techniques of evidence collection and preservation, then your evidence will probably be inadmissable.

And the logic in that is….what, exactly? Are there any other areas of criminal law where these double standards apply? (This is a genuine question – we don’t know the answer but would like to hear from anyone who can enlighten us and help us to understand these rules).

Is it any wonder our wildlife crime conviction rates (and especially for raptor persecution incidents) are so pathetically low? How many more legal obstacles are going to be placed in the way of bringing these criminals to justice?

Yet another golden eagle mysteriously ‘disappears’

Last month we blogged about the ‘disappearance’ of a satellite-tagged golden eagle (see here). Now 22 days later we’re blogging about another one. Isn’t it strange how many UK satellite-tagged raptors go ‘missing’; not just golden eagles, but white-tailed eagles, hen harriers and red kites too. Wonder how these figures compare with tagged raptors in other parts of the world?

The last signal from the latest young golden eagle (#32857) to go ‘missing’ was received on May 11, just to the north-east of the Cairngorms National Park (see here).

Was it just a satellite tag failure and the eagle is still alive and well? Possibly.  Did it die of natural causes? Possibly. Was it poisoned? Possibly. Was it shot? Possibly. Was it caught inside a crow cage trap and bludgeoned to death? Possibly. Will we ever find out? Possibly. If it is found to have been killed illegally, will the perpetrator be brought to justice? Probably not (see here for the ever-growing list of dead and/or missing eagles in recent years for which nobody has ever been prosecuted).

Somebody asked a question the other day and we’ve still not been able to provide an answer:

“What does it take to secure a conviction for killing an eagle in the UK?”.

We’ve heard all the excuses in the book, some valid, some not:

(i) The discovery of a poisoned eagle on a sporting estate isn’t enough to secure a conviction because either it could have been poisoned elsewhere and then flown to die at that location, or, it could have been ‘planted’ on the estate by the anti-game-shooting lobby (according to claims made by various gamekeepers over the years although without any actual evidence).

(ii) The discovery of a poisoned eagle lying next to a poisoned bait on a sporting estate isn’t enough to secure a conviction because it’s virtually impossible to identify which individual gamekeeper laid the bait, especially when they all deny it.

(iii) The discovery of a poisoned eagle and a stash of the same poison found on premises on the same sporting estate, and an admission from an individual gamekeeper that he had sole access to the poison isn’t enough to secure a conviction because….well, we don’t know the answer to that one, you’d have to ask COPFS.

(iv) The discovery of a poisoned eagle and a stash of the same poison found in vehicles and traces of it on knives and gamebags on the same estate isn’t enough to secure a conviction because….we don’t know the answer to that one either – ask COPFS.

(v) What if somebody was filmed laying out a poisoned bait and was then later filmed returning to remove the eagle poisoned by that bait? The film evidence would probably be ruled inadmissable because the cameraman was operating ‘covertly’ (i.e. without the landowner’s permission!).

(vi) What if a gamekeeper was found with a dead eagle in the back of his vehicle, and the eagle had injuries consistent with being caught in an illegal spring trap (e.g. broken legs) and having had its head caved in with a blunt object (e.g. smashed skull)? This wouldn’t be enough to secure a conviction because the keeper would probably claim he had just found the dead bird and was taking it home to report it to the authorities. At best he’d be charged with ‘possession’.

The shocking truth is, there has never been a successful prosecution for the illegal killing of an eagle in the UK, in spite of the sometimes overwhelmingly compelling evidence in some cases. So, just what does it take for someone to be convicted of killing an eagle in the UK?

Scottish gamekeepers in court: latest

Two cases against two Scottish gamekeepers have been heard recently at Perth Sheriff Court:

David Campbell, head gamekeeper at Edradynate Estate, Perthshire, is charged with various offences relating to firearms and explosives (see here). His case has been continued for an intermediate diet on 26 July 2012. At that hearing it will be decided whether the case proceeds to trial on 20 August 2012. This is an interesting one for several reasons which will become clear in due course.

Jonathan Graham, apparently a gamekeeper at Glenlyon Estate, Perthshire, is charged with three offences under the Wildlife & Countryside Act (Section 5 (1) (b) relating to the prohibition of certain methods of killing or taking wild birds. The hearing was continued today until 27 June 2012. Those of you interested in the topical subject of crow cage traps (see here) might want to follow this case.

Crow traps: what you should know part 1

Without even the tiniest weeniest hint of irony, the Scottish Gamekeepers Association is complaining about ‘criminal activity in the countryside’ in reference to the recent alleged release of crows from a trap on a Scottish sporting estate.

Oh and it gets better…. according to the SGA, in response to this criminal activity Northern Constabulary has “issued an appeal for information”. Although we should point out that we’ve been unable to find any public record of this ‘appeal for information’ so we only have the SGA’s word to rely upon. But let’s assume the SGA is telling the truth…

Is this the same Northern Constabulary who apparently failed to fully investigate the suspected decapitation and shooting of a white-tailed eagle on Skye (see here) and the discovery of a poisoned red kite on the boundary of Skibo Estate (see here)?

That’s not the end of the irony either – the SGA goes on to suggest that cameras could be installed at crow traps, presumably to film any member of the public who may be inclined to interefere with the trap (which may amount to a criminal offence). Wouldn’t it be interesting to see whether that film footage would be considered as acceptable evidence in any subsequent prosecution, especially after recent film footage showing the activities of a Scottish gamekeeper using a stick to beat crows to death inside a crow trap on a Speyside sporting estate (see here), was deemed inadmissable evidence?

One rule for one but not the other? Surely not!

In light of the SGA’s recent one-sided promotion of crow traps and their encouragement to SGA members to report suspected trap interference (see here for their article) as well as the landowners’ representative body, Scottish Land and Estates, encouraging their members to do likewise (see here), we thought it only fair that we provide an alternative view on the use (and more importantly the mis-use) of crow traps on Scottish sporting estates and give the public the neccessary information about how to recognise the difference between a legal and an illegal trap, and what to do if you find an illegal one.

Watch this space…