Habitual Wayne County Offender Receives Jail Time, Loses Hunting Privileges For Life

If he ignores the court order that has banned him from hunting for life, 32-year-old Jimmy Daniel Prater could find himself spending considerably more time in jail because of his habitual history of deer poaching.

 

“We have been watching Mr. Prater for a long time and received help from local sportsmen and residents providing information about his movements,” said Wayne County Wildlife Officer Tim Aston. “Along with the excellent work of Dr. Mike Stockdale (a forensics specialist known for his expertise in wildlife enforcement cases), we were able to obtain one of the most severe convictions that I have seen for poaching.”

 

Aston, with help from fellow wildlife officers in southern Middle Tennessee, spent many hours collecting data that included tissue samples from dead deer that ultimately linked Prater to numerous deer poaching crimes.

“Prater enjoyed killing big bucks and then removing their antlers for trophies,” said Aston. “We had an idea that some of the deer we found were killed by him. We removed tissue samples from the dead animals and eventually were able to match that tissue with tissue obtained from antlers confiscated from Prater’s home.”

 

Found guilty of his third poaching offense, Prater was told by Circuit Court Judge Robert L. Jones that he must spend 80 days in the Wayne County Jail beginning Jan. 12, but that he would enforce a stricter sentence if Prater was ever caught hunting again. In addition, Judge Jones ordered Prater to pay nearly $3,200 in court costs and fines.

 

“We charged him with his third offense just over a year ago and it’s taken this long for the case to get through circuit court,” said Aston. “This conviction actually had a strong connection to his second poaching offense that took place in 2005. He appealed the court decision in 2005 all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court before he finally had to accept his loss.”

 

However, Prater went hunting after he was aware of the Supreme Court decision, which meant he violated the court order that had at the time revoked his hunting privilege for one year.

“He wasn’t supposed to be hunting at all, but he killed a buck on the opening of archery season in 2007 with a deer rifle and then took it to a local checking station so that he could obtain a kill tag,” said Aston. 

The state requires hunters to check in bagged deer so that TWRA can more accurately manage its deer populations largely based on deer harvest numbers. But, hunters cannot take deer without a “kill tag” to meat processing businesses or taxidermists.

 

“He had another trophy deer and wanted to get it mounted,” said Aston. “That was another situation where Dr. Stockdale verified through forensic work that the buck Prater killed in 2007 had been killed by a bullet rather than an arrow.”

 

So, in addition to killing a deer on a revoked license in 2007, Prater was also charged with his killing a deer out of season (third offense), and with falsifying a government document (the TWRA kill tag). Later in 2007, Aston caught and charged Prater again for spotlighting deer at night and hunting deer in a closed season.

 

“We only carried forward enough charges from 2007 to obtain a desired conviction,” noted Aston. “If he ignores his court order we can instate every charge against him and that is a total of 16 counts of various poaching violations.”  

 

Prater’s first trouble with wildlife laws was in 1994 when he was found guilty of spotlighting and hunting deer in closed season.

 

“Officer Aston had important help in this case, but he did an excellent job developing it and collecting data over a several years that helped get a conviction,” said Chuck Borum, the supervisor in Area 22 which includes Wayne County. “Most poaching cases are considered misdemeanors in Tennessee, so to get a conviction as stout as this one is a credit to his determination as a wildlife officer.”  

 

---TWRA---