Local attorney Kay Kuns doesn’t seem to get
it.
She says, in a letter to the editor on the
next page, that we’re distracting her with errors about a case in which she
represents the defendants. It’s a pretty straightforward hunter trespass case —
the defendants entered private property at sundown, ostensibly to hunt ducks,
without first obtaining consent from the property owner and in defiance of
no-trespassing signs.
The property owner is Nancy Crawford-Hall,
owner and publisher of this newspaper, although if the defendants’ story, as
related in an earlier missive from their lawyer, is to be believed they also
violated the property rights of a host of other landowners along the way.
Kuns’ objection to an earlier editorial is
that we erred in a particular fact — we said her clients invaded the San
Lucas Ranch on Jan. 14, when in fact, she says, they did so on Dec. 17.
OK, we’ll agree that we reported the wrong
date. But her conclusion, that getting the date wrong makes everything else we
said wrong, is just plain silly.
Her clients were on ranch property without
permission. They were there at and after sundown, despite her objection that it
was before 5 p.m. The sun set before 5 p.m. on Dec. 17.
We find it difficult to believe that Kuns’
clients would have driven up the riverbed 12 miles or so from Buellton just to
blast away at a few ducks on the ranch — they bagged 14, she says. Even
riding all terrain vehicles, that’s a long trek. It’s even a longer trek for
the dog, who surely wasn’t driving an ATV.
Kuns seems to be basing her defense of her
clients’ misdeeds on a claim that the riverbed is somehow a no-man’s land,
exempt from the laws of property. If so, she’s wrong.
But we think she knows that, because she’s a
pretty good lawyer with an excellent reputation as defense counsel.
And she knows that the California Supreme
Court already has addressed this matter, and said — way back in 1933 —
that the riverbed is private property, part and parcel of the ranchland that
surrounds it.
If, as Kuns earlier claimed, her clients
entered the riverbed in Buellton to go duck hunting, why in the world would
they choose to do so at the San Lucas Ranch, which is the last ranch through
which the river winds as one follows it upstream to Lake Cachuma?
And why would they so cavalierly trample on
the property rights of all the landowners between Buellton and Hwy. 154? Have
they no respect for what other people own?
The implication of Kuns’ letter is that her
clients were within their rights to trespass because they had hunting licenses.
If that were so, whatever could the Fish and Game officer have had in mind when
he issued the citations for hunter trespass?
That raises again the question of whether
there was some other, nefarious purpose for their presence on Crawford-Hall’s
property.
They could have stopped and hunted anywhere
along the riverbed, which probably would have saved a lot of wear and tear on
the poor dog trotting along beside them — so, why the San Lucas Ranch?
We think there was a message in their
presence: people who were neither wanted nor permitted on San Lucas Ranch could
enter and approach the owner’s home, which is sited just above the river,
bearing — for that matter, firing — guns, and taking wildlife that
otherwise would have been protected there. The gesture was a fillip aimed
directly at Crawford-Hall. And if not that, then it must have been a
filiopietistic assertion of presumed superiority by the leader of the group,
Bubba Armenta.
It is interesting that the writer of two
letters to the editor about this incident within three weeks makes the claim
that she prefers not to try her cases in the press. We agree with her, she
shouldn’t. But then, we have two letters, which leaves us to wonder what’s
afoot. She says she is driven to denounce ethnically-charged remarks, an
aspersion we don’t think we deserve.
There was no calumny in our earlier editorial,
and there is none in this one.
We rely on the facts both we and she agree
upon to conclude that these individuals need to be held to account for their
individual acts.
We’d like to know what drove them, but if we
knew it likely would change nothing. They trespassed and they ought to be
punished for it.
It seems to us to be disingenuous to castigate
the property owner for exercising her property rights; and it seems downright
dastardly that someone — anyone — would try to steal those rights
by claiming that theirs is the privilege to reinterpret the law just because
they want to.
That’ll be 2 cents, please.