No; it's the same as a drug/prostitution sting.
"Help, we shot a deer and want to find it in the dark so we can put it out of its misery. Will you help us?"
Which person of good conscience would say no to something like that?
Who would even think that would be illegal, much less under four different state laws...?! Why are we spending tax dollars on something like this? What sort of harm are we trying to prevent by forcing deer to die slow, agonizing deaths in the dark?
I'm not sure if 1) there is a difference (or should be) between hunting and recovery or 2) if it matters if it's night or 3) if it matters if it's electronically aided or not or 4) if it matters whether it's a spotlight used for mesmerization or a drone with minimal lights (or maybe IR)...
Even the judge in this case seemed to believe the laws were confusing and ambiguous and wanted the legislature to clean them up. In that case, I wish they'd just let the man go (and stop enforcing these laws until they're cleaned up and rewritten).
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Maybe there is some unspoken implication here that Mr. Wingenroth clearly knew this was an illegal act, offered his services deceptively somehow (i.e. maybe drone recovery is legal but drone hunting isn't?), but then why would he advertise such services online, and then why would they nail him for recovery instead of hunting?
It just doesn't really make sense. What am I missing?
I don't know whether it is or not, or why, but harassing wildlife and livestock is certainly illegal and as someone who's had a drone flying over his herd of horses, I can assure you that it's for good reason.
> difference (or should be) between hunting and recovery or 2) if it matters if it's night
Are you seriously asking why hunting at night might be illegal? If it helps, I can tell you about my sister-in-law whose horse was shot and killed at dusk. "I thought it was a big deer."
This is an important part to me. Just because something is illegal does not make it correct. A big reason we have a court of peers in the first place is to have this check. We have jury nullification which is the equivalent to "that law is dumb" or "law is fine, but applying it here is dumb"
Not to mention that times change. All rules are made to be broken. I think of all people, programmers would be experts in understanding how any set of rules cannot have complete coverage over all situations. If you don't understand this, go visit your QA team and ask them why this random HN user told you to visit them, and bring donuts or something.
You arent, hunters are.
For the most part, hunting law enforcement, ecological work, and wildlife science are funded directly from hunting permits.
Whether this is a good law or not is open to debate. There is a vast amount of hunting laws that restrict actions that are not sporting, sustainable, or have potential for abuse.
I imagine the argument is that there is no viable way to discern hunting with drones from recovery with drones, so their use is prohibited entirely.
Anybody who hunts should know the laws around tracking and recovering game animals.
Do you know your state's entire vehicle code by heart when you drive?
Do you know every environmental and wildlife law when you go on a hike?
Do you know every state's tax laws when you do business online?
Our legal system is incomprehensibly complex, and the average person stands zero chance of "knowing" all of its nuances. For every subject matter of law, there are specialized lawyers who spend their lives studying and practicing just that one little sphere.
Now, maybe the context is that there is something obviously illegal and commonly understood about recovering game at night that hunters know and I don't...? Is there?
That seems fundamentally different to me than using a drone to recover a deer's body (that had previously been shot).
Does that matter?
Maybe it's the case that it's impossible to enforce a working difference between "using a drone light to mesmerize a deer pre-kill" vs "using a drone light to locate a deer's body", but in that case it seems like the law should just be against drones in hunting seasons/areas, rather than "spotlighting". But as far as I can tell no such law was on the books (and the judge also wanted clearer laws).
And spotlighting is illegal for good reason. Deer hunting (and most game hunting) is supposed to be "sporting" - there should be some challenge - tracking, hit the target, etc. Spotlighting takes away that sporting aspect - it causes the deer to freeze, making it easy to kill.
And if "spotlights for recovery" is legal, then "spotlights for hunting" becomes nearly impossible to enforce as a hunter would always claim "the deer was dead, I was just recovering it".
You dont need to know the entire vehicle code for driving or hiking, but you are in fact responsible for understanding the parts relevant to the actions you are personally engaging in.
But to your point, yes, a lot of this is common knowledge amongst hunters.
But vague ideas? Sure. Some sort of more "restorative justice" approach, e.g. make the person attend an educational workshop about why drones aren't allowed, then make him do a few hours of community service for his local parks/hunting grounds. Don't give him a criminal record for something like this.
I don't think law enforcement should always be a binary, adversarial system, especially when it's the state against a lone individual for some victimless crime (or where the harm is so spread out that the victim is just a vague "everyone" rather than specific named individuals).
> But to your point, yes, a lot of this is common knowledge amongst hunters.
I believe you. It is surprising, then, that this drone operator just advertises his services online.
However, I think activities that are specifically licensed are clearly different. When you get a hunter's license, driver's license, or business license, you are certifying that you understand is that a body of law exists around that activity, and you are responsible for knowing it.
Another problem is that giving essentially one free pass for low detection events effectively invalidates the law. For example, things like poaching and game violations, lawbreakers might have a lifetime detection rate of 1% . Knowing you get one warning means many people will only consider compliance after that warning.
>I believe you. It is surprising, then, that this drone operator just advertises his services online
IMO, One brazen operator is less surprising when you consider the 10s of thousands of hunters that dont do this. I can call up hundreds of unlicensed caterers online, but I expect every one of them knows their status relative to the law.
I can only speculate about this guy. If they had honest intent and actually unsure, the wardens are always 1 phone call away to clarify their understanding of the law. Maybe they thought wardens had bigger fish to fry, maybe they were making a ideological statement. I think it is even possible that the thought it was legally ambiguous and willing to risk it. I just don't think it is realistic to think they were completely ignorant in this case.
If they were some recreational drone operator providing impromptu aid, and unaffiliated with a hunting business, that would be a different case (and I hope that wardens and judges would take this into consideration).
The problem comes when the game dept also makes it clear it wants hunters to recovery injured/dead game. Which is hard at night without a spotlight.
The answer, to me, seems to be "don't hunt deer at night." Making spotlights legal for recovery just make it impossible to enforce anti-spotlighting laws with live game.
Good, humane results don't make the acts legal.
This seems more like "Help, I'm hungry. Will you turn on the kitchen light so I can find the pasta I bought?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlighting is widely illegal. He most certainly would've known this; it's clear from https://www.instagram.com/wingydroneservices/ they're at least close to the hunting world.
If you try sufficiently hard, you can always find random charges to throw at someone, and if they don't have good enough lawyers, they're fucked. That doesn't mean the laws are just or desirable to begin with. It also doesn't explain why those laws were written in the first place, i.e. what issue they were initially trying to address.
You'll find various explanations, but the most compelling to me is "because you probably can't see what's behind the lit-up deer when you shoot very well". Good way to risk hitting something/someone.
> It's also not illegal everywhere.
It was here, it seems.
Seems... dubious. If you can't see behind the deer while it's lit up, you certainly can't see what's behind it in pitch darkness. Presumably the eyeshine of other animals, or the reflective clothing / panicked shouts of another person behind the deer, would all stand out more in bright lighting.
> It was here, it seems.
Are you sure about that? There was no law per se against using drones to recover deer, so they had to cobble together 4 vaguely relevant statutes. And even the judge reprimanded the legislature for having such confusing, ambiguous laws on the books.
I believe this is still under appeal, so it may ultimately resolve in favor of the drone operator...
You can demonstrate this pretty easily at night in your backyard. Have someone shine a flashlight at something. Same reason photos of the moon don't show the stars in the sky; they get washed out by the brighter object.
> Are you sure about that?
That's a reply to "It's [spotlighting] also not illegal everywhere." Yes, I'm certain, given the charges.
> You can demonstrate this pretty easily at night in your backyard. Have someone shine a flashlight at something.
I don't hunt, but I do go outside at night with a hiking headlight, and it's never been my experience that I could see something better, further away, without lighting. Even when there's something closer to me reflecting much of the light (like a tree), some of the light will go around it and light up what it's behind it. In the absolute worst case (like when I accidentally point the light at a retroreflective street sign), yes, there'll a huge blindingly bright spot, but still much of the light will spill around it, and aiming just a few degrees left or right will then illuminate the stuff behind it.
Have you had different experiences, or can you think of a specific scenario where this wouldn't be the case?
> Same reason photos of the moon don't show the stars in the sky; they get washed out by the brighter object.
That's not really the same thing. Cameras have limited dynamic range to begin with, and in that case, both the reflected moonlight and the ambient starlight are facing the photographer... with the reflected moonlight being several orders of magnitude brighter.
That's more like having someone shining a bright flashlight in your face from a foot away while there's some old dim string lights in the background.
It's not the same as two objects reflecting light from the same light source pointed away from the observer, held by the observer. Unless there's some big difference in reflectance between those objects, presumably their apparent brightness would mostly be a function of their distance.
Yes, I've looked at lit-up objects at night and not been able to see very well behind them. If you need a light to see the deer, you need a light to see the stuff that's potentially dozens or hundreds of feet behind it too.
Humans have better dynamic range than a camera, but not unlimitedly so.
"Entrapment is a complete defense to a criminal charge, on the theory that 'Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person's mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute.'" - Justice.gov
The only way this doesn't look like entrapment to me is if the agent called the man and said, "Hey I wounded a deer, can you help?" and the man replied, "I'll use my drone!" Even then, I seriously wonder how this doesn't stray into the territory of implanting the disposition to commit said crime.
Entrapment is when law enforcement coerces you into taking an illegal action that you otherwise would not have taken. I.E. A federal agent telling you that if you don't walk into that bank and rob it, they will arrest you for (a planted) firearms possession.
This case is about whether the defendants actions actually were illegal, because PA law seems ambiguous about it.
Need, sympathy or friendship. I think it's trivial to allow that finding a wounded animal would constitute a sympathetic plea.
It's the predisposition that gets him here. Given that he advertises the service, he's obviously predisposed to the action.
(In case it gets deleted: a photo of a dead deer, from October 20 2023, with the caption: "We were happy to help Nate locate his personal best buck. The roller coaster of emotions is hard to explain, but the end result of this story was awesome to share. Congratulations, Nate! #wingydroneservices #from400above #drone #dronedeer")
To give a simile example to show why I think this: if someone calls me up and says "I don't like a person and wish I never had to see them again, please shoot them dead" vs. them calling me saying "I don't like a person and wish I never had to see them again" and me thinking on my own and shooting them dead - either way, I'm choosing to do something illegal, and I haven't been asked to do it by anyone I have reason to believe has the authority to let me legally murder someone. My shooting the person would, rightly, be illegal and not entrapment even if the person pretending to be my friend on the phone actually was a police officer.