Shooting deer at night costs Chester teen car, community service

A Chester County teen escaped a possible year in prison Thursday after he was sentenced to 20 hours of community service cleaning up a state park for shooting a deer at night.

The deer was killed Nov. 3 and dragged away for later pickup, after which state wildlife agents caught Robert Land, 18, and he confessed, court testimony from S.C. Department of Natural Resources Officer J.C. Hough showed.

“I’m sorry,” Land said in court to Judge Brian Gibbons, offering no other explanation for why he saw the deer in his headlights of his car, stopped, pulled out a hunting rifle and killed it.

Gibbons also gave Land 90 days of probation and suspended a six-month jail sentence for the crime of “night hunting for deer or bear,” and also did not impose a fine that could have been up to $1,000.

Yet state law enacted to deter illegal hunting allows state wildlife agents to seize a poacher’s vehicle – and that happened to Land. His 2002 Mazda that he had just bought for $2,500 days before the shooting the deer was lost to him then, and prosecutors gave the title to the wildlife agents Thursday.

William Frick, Chester County’s deputy public defender and Land’s lawyer, argued against any more fines or jail time for Land, saying his client “did a stupid thing – he saw a deer, he had a gun, and he used it.”

More, Land, who had no previous record, was ineligible for pretrial intervention that would have wiped his record clean if completed because hunting violations are ineligible, Frick said.

“They don’t take your car if you kill somebody, but for this deer they took his car,” Frick said.

This story was originally published March 19, 2015 at 2:48 PM with the headline "Shooting deer at night costs Chester teen car, community service."