Pfighting Polish: wildcardjack: Wow... 10 weights in 5 fish. iat's rather blatant, I think I expected a few fishing lure weights.

That's the thing. This was far from subtle. It was blatant and easily exposed. The video is incredibly damning, to the point where you wonder how they possibly thought they could get away with this.

If this is how they were doing it for however many years before this, too, I wonder just how they got away with this for so long.

I also wonder about the charges. I get some folks are really out for blood with these guys, but I struggle to see how this is more than fraud. Yes, that's pretty serious when you're taking about fraud to a serious extent, but I feel like the other charges are kinda reaches. Then again, it may be part of getting them to plea. It's not like there isn't evidence.

Pfighting Polish: capacc: Someone told me the filets were to keep the weights from moving around

That's what I heard, too. Moreso to keep the weights from knocking together and making noise than anything. There is a certain sensibility to using something that already came from a(nother) fish to accomplish the task.

Robinfro: Anything you possess while committing a crime becomes a tool of said crime. The attempted theft would be from theft by deception, the tools would be the boat, trailer, truck, weights, poles, lures. The unlawful owning of wild animals would be from the walleye filets they stuffed in the fish (I'm guessing that's a higher crime than poaching out-of-season).

You don't fark around with the DA in a county with an event like this that brings in revenue: they'll nail you to the wall because you're dragging everyone's reputation through the mud.

With the caveat that you sound like you know what you're talking about and I'm merely being argumentative, I'm looking at this and thinking:

1. Being charged with felony "cheating" sounds vague to me. I'm kinda surprised that's a legally defined felony. Note to self: Don't try to sneak an extra bill from the bank when passing 'Go' in a game of Monopoly in that county.

2. Like I say, this sounds more like fraud. The competitors gave fish that were supposedly caught in a certain way and 100-percent fish, for which they were going to receive contest winnings. Instead, the competitors gave fish with weights that weren't 100-percent fish and took the money anyway, in breech of the presumed contract one signs when entering such a contest. Not so much theft, because they didn't out-and-out steal the money. But they gave fraudulent fish.

3. None of the tools unto themselves are criminal. It's not illegal to have a licensed boat, or fishing poles, or bait, or fish, or filets, or lead weights. You've already addressed this, but again, this just seems like an odd legal definition. Unless any crime is committed with one's bare hands, one's using tools. For that matter, unless a crime is committed barefoot or even naked, shoes and clothes could be considered tools that aided in the crime.

4. Is it illegal to own filets? How do we know they didn't just buy them from the store?

I mean, yes, I can get behind the idea they did somethingillegal. I just think the way they're defining it legally sounds kind of ill-defined in a way that I feel like a sharp lawyer could get some of this thrown out.