Update 2: Moose, Court Case and Denali Boundary
Update: 12/29/08:
Back on Dec 5 Jeff King was ordered to pay a $4,000 fine and another $750 in restitution to the National Park Service. King was found guilty in court this fall of shooting a bull moose 600 feet inside the park boundary in 2007.
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Update 9/24: On Sept 21 the Alaska Daily News reported that King and his lawyer want to re-open the nearly complete trial to add some additional evidence:
The four-time Iditarod champion and his attorney say the National Park Service put up new boundary markers along the park’s northeast border after the date King is accused of slipping into the park to shoot a young bull last year.
—- original post 8/19/08——
Fifty-two year old Jeff King is famous because he won the Iditerod in 2006. Now he’s famous because he’s on trial for killing a moose, allegedly in Denali National Park. That’s illegal for those who are not subsistence users.
The big issue at this point in the trial is where the park boundary is and how it’s marked.
Also noted: how easy it is to find a map of the park on its website. These snippets from a Daily News-Miner (Fairbanks, Alaska) article highlight the thinking thus far.
Later that day[of the kill], [park ranger John] Leonard and an Alaska Wildlife Trooper found a pile of bones just outside the park’s boundary, and the gut pile at the kill site was located 600 feet within the park.
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“I think the bottom line was that I knew it was close,” King said on the tape. “I always knew it was close, but I’ve never seen a [deleted] thing marked.”
King’s attorney, fellow musher Byron Angstman of Bethel, questioned the location of the park’s border in his cross-examination. While prosecutors entered more than 20 maps and pictures of the park’s boundary into evidence, Angstman questioned different boundaries on them as well as the width of the boundary lines, which varied from approximately one-sixteenth of a mile to several miles, depending on the size of the map.
Also at issue are the locations of metallic markers delineating the park’s boundary. Angstman submitted several photos into evidence showing that the markers are almost impossible to spot while walking along the border.
He questioned whether the park rangers were even able to locate them when returning to the kill site in a helicopter.
“We had to look for them, yes,” Leonard said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Cooper countered that a hunter would know where the park’s boundaries were by using GPS coordinates available on the Denali Park Web site, though Angstman wondered if an older person who is less familiar with computers would be able to find that information easily on the Web site.
“I’ve got to tell that you that last night I tried to search for a map of the park on the Web site, and I couldn’t find it,” Angstman said to laughs from those in the courtroom.
Could it be a bad map or poor access to a map could turn the case? If convicted of two counts (the kill in the park and driving in the park) King could be sentenced to a year in prison and fined $10,000.
