Dablemont column: Never innocent enough

Steve and Laurie Kastning own 40 acres of land near Seymour, Mo., where they each killed a doe deer on opening weekend of the deer season using their landowner tags. Steve Kastning also bought two deer tags so he could hunt on his neighbor's land, where he killed a button buck and checked it on his purchased antlerless tag, as you are permitted to do with a buck that has no antlers.

As you are suppose to do, they notched their tags and promptly called in each deer, and wrote the confirmation numbers on their tags. At noon on a recent Sunday, they took their deboned deer meat in coolers, with the tags, to a deer processing business in Seymour, and the lady in charge said she would do the meat immediately. Steve left the three tags on the counter and went back to his home to get his checkbook. Returning, he wrote a check for $48.10, and he and his wife took the 70 one-pound packages of ground deer meat and their three tags and returned home, where they put the meat in their freezer. You couldn't do things any more legally than they did it.

That Sunday afternoon, a Missouri Department of Conservation enforcement agent came to their home with another man in plain clothing, and said he was doing a routine spot check. The Kastnings let both of them in their home, and said the agent was very friendly to begin with, but his demeanor changed as he quickly found something wrong. He said the tags had not been punched on the day and month the deer were killed! Mrs. Kastning patiently showed him where they had indeed been punched, just as they were suppose to be. His mistake seemed to anger him, then he complained that Steve should have checked his button buck as a buck, and said he was getting tired of hunters checking them as antlerless deer.

Of course, a button buck IS an antlerless deer, so he couldn't write a ticket for that. So then he left and went to the processing plant, and returned to say the plant indicated they hadn't processed any meat for the Kastnings. Of course, that processed check proved they did, and the packaged meat was marked in packages, as the processing plant marked it. Personally, I think the agent knew that all along.

"I work at the Department of Corrections on Sunday afternoon," Steve Kastning said. "So I went to work and when he returned, I was gone. My wife took him to the basement and showed him the meat in the freezer and he called me and wanted to know where the hides and heads were. I told him I had dumped them at the back of my place. That seemed to make him mad, and he wanted to know if he could find them. I told him I would take him and show them to him when I was off work. He really was belligerent over the phone, and told me that if he could find a reason to write me a citation, he would. I told him that we had done nothing wrong."

One week later, the agent returned on a Sunday afternoon and gave Steve Kastning two citations for not having his tags with the deer meat, which he referred to as 'unidentifiable', that was packaged in the freezer. He gave Laurie Kastning one. And then he proceeded to tell them how to pay the $475 in fines. All this time, the tags were there, they just weren't in the freezer with those 70 packages of meat. How in the world, one might ask, would any hunter be able to identify which deer was in which packages after it came back ground up by a processor?  What deer hunter with meat in his freezer would not be subject to some kind of petty and malicious charge as this agent came up with. 

Mrs. Kastning made a mistake by graciously taking the agent down to her basement to show him the processed meat, the only way she knew how to prove to him they had indeed taken it to the processor. To legally look in that freezer and go into her basement he would have had to have a search warrant had she not voluntarily taken him to prove they had done nothing wrong.

If there was ever a case where completely innocent people have been targeted by an M.D.C. agent, this is it. Mrs. Kastning has an appointment to see a specialist physician on January 30, a long standing and necessary medical appointment. That's when they are to appear in court. The prosecuting attorney wouldn't talk with them, they had to hire a lawyer to go to court on the 30th, and he will only enter a plea of not guilty, so that a court date can be set. It is likely that the Kastnings will be in court a short time, be found guilty and have more than $1,000 in costs and fines, just because that agent was looking for an easy way to do his job without actually getting out in the woods. He targeted people who were innocent, and I seriously doubt they have a chance in court, even though a jury would no doubt find them innocent. It will be a single judge who hears them, not a jury.

A year or so ago, MDC enforcement chief Larry Yamnitz told me in his office that when this type of thing happens, and innocent people are targeted with petty offenses, he would act to have the situation corrected.  We will see if that can be the case here.  If this one can't be overturned, what could be?  These people are only one of many such injustices which involve MDC conservation agents. That badge gives them so much power that some of them freely abuse it.

I am absolutely and completely convinced that the Kastinings tried their very best to do what was right. How ridiculous it is to come back a week later and target them because their meat in their freezer can technically be found stacked in the wrong place or the wrong way! With the standards he used, all deer hunters with meat in their freezer are guilty of something. The MDC ought to be ashamed of this, and that agent should be fired. Any judge and prosecutor should be ashamed to see this situation come to their court. I intend to be there when the case is heard and I will follow up on this and let readers know the outcome. 

Several hog hunters were similarly targeted last year when their dogs strayed onto private land. Leaving their guns on land they had permission to hunt, they went on the adjacent land to retrieve their dogs. The caretaker of the land, who later boasted he was paid handsomely when a trespasser was prosecuted, called three MDC agents who came in and found the feral hog bayed by the dogs. The agents instructed the hunters to take the dogs and tie up the hog and take it to where they could kill it and butcher it. They complied, and FOUR MONTHS LATER they were charged with transporting a live feral hog. Of course feral hogs are unwanted, and hunters are urged to kill them. The MDC traps and slaughters all they can catch. But in this case, Larry Yamnitz, Chief of Enforcement, told me on the phone that the agents just didn't know the law when they told the hunters to take the hog away alive. Even though it was butchered and eaten, the agents were told by the local prosecutor, he says, to write the men up for the violation. Each paid $780 in a court without a jury, plus the cost of a lawyer who basically did little more than offer a guilty plea for them. Again, the agents weren't familiar with the laws, the hunters followed their instructions, and paid dearly for it.

The MDC shouldn't be proud of such a thing, and if this doesn't amount to persecution of innocent people, I don't know what does. There seems to be no end to it until the people of Missouri stand up in mass against it.

My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com and my e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net.  Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.