An Anchorage-based looking information has been sentenced to 6 months in jail for illegally guiding big-game hunts and committing varied wildlife crimes on federal lands, in accordance with the Division of Justice. After reaching a plea deal final month in U.S. District Court docket, Stephen Hicks will serve six months in an Oregon jail, adopted by three years of supervised probation. The courtroom additionally ordered Hicks to forfeit his curiosity in a Piper Tremendous Cub airplane and pay $13,400 in restitution charges.
“The necessity for jail is to clarify that blatant disregard for state and federal fish and wildlife guidelines is not going to be tolerated,” Chief U.S. District Decide Sharon L. Gleason stated when figuring out Hicks’ sentence.
In September 2021, the 45-year-old Anchorage resident pleaded responsible to violating the Lacey Act by main a paying consumer on a sheep hunt on federally owned lands close to Max Lake, Alaska. Along with not having the right allow, Hicks violated state regulation by failing to be current when his consumer killed a Dall sheep.
Throughout the sentencing, prosecutors referenced a number of different state expenses in opposition to Hicks, which occurred over a five-year span from 2014 to 2019. These expenses included losing moose meat, illegally baiting bears, guiding same-day airborne hunts, taking huge sport with out paying for required tags, and guiding and not using a license.
“Hicks’ criminal activity demonstrates that he positioned revenue over professionalism, revenue and revenue over guiding ethics, and revenue over looking ethics,” U.S attorneys wrote within the sentencing doc.
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A number of of the costs introduced in opposition to Hicks got here from a 2017 hunt that he guided close to Camp Yakataga. As a part of a courtroom choice from 2019, Hicks’ shoppers described this expedition to prosecutors. The three shoppers recalled a rain-soaked journey the place they stayed in a dirty cabin infested with mould and rat feces. They stated that Hicks didn’t present up for a number of days, and that one in every of them killed a brown bear with out Hicks being there. The shoppers additionally expressed their concern that Hicks’s assistant information was unfamiliar with the terrain, and that Hicks used plane to identify moose, in accordance with the choice doc. This led Alaskan choose Cheryl Mandala to revoke Hicks license in 2019.
As federal prosecutors identified in U.S. District Court docket, there have been different cases the place Hicks led guided hunts with out the right license and violated extra wildlife legal guidelines.
The state dropped their expenses when the federal sentence was given as a result of the federal prosecution included the state’s accusations of their sentencing. After his jail sentence, Hicks will start his three-year probationary interval, throughout which he is not going to be allowed to fly personal plane or interact in any type of industrial looking exercise.
