COEUR D'ALENE -- State Rep. Jeff Alltus has been ordered to pay $975 in penalties and spend 40 hours talking to high schools and hunter education classes for poaching an elk last year.
"I think you would be a great asset to hunter education," Magistrate Patrick McFadden told the Coeur d'Alene Republican in imposing the sentence. "It's a shame you find yourself in a situation like this."
McFadden also placed Alltus on one year's unsupervised probation but declined to suspend the lawmaker's hunting license. The maximum penalty was a fine of up to $1,050 and revocation of hunting privileges for three years.
"I never intended to break the law," Alltus told McFadden. "I am laying down my sword. If this is the treatment other citizens get, then I want to be treated like other citizens."
Alltus pleaded guilty to possession of an illegally killed elk. He was hunting with his 14-year-old son in October 1998 in the St. Joe River country when he shot a second trophy bull elk without getting out of his tree to determine whether he had killed the first trophy bull he had fired at. When he found that both were dead, he decided to put his son's tag on the second and pack both out.
He entered the antlers in a local sporting goods store's big game contest before finally reporting the incident to the Fish and Game Department nine months after it occurred, apparently once a family friend threatened to expose him.
In court on Tuesday, McFadden scolded Alltus for acting as he did in front of "your impressionable 14-year-old son." Alltus denied that he was motivated to confess by the threat of exposure. He said he acted out of conscience.
But family friend Bob Boyd has acknowledged threatening Alltus because he was concerned that the incident was causing problems between Alltus and his now-estranged wife. Boyd said Alltus blamed his wife for the poaching story getting out.
"I wanted to take the onus off his wife," Boyd said a month after the incident became public. "I did tell him if he didn't quit ragging on his wife about it, he would read about it in the newspaper."
Margaret Alltus filed for legal separation from her husband of 19 years in mid-September, citing irreconcilable differences that apparently included the poaching incident. The couple has two teen-age children.
Alltus, 44, has two previous warnings from Fish and Game officials -- one for illegally hunting tree squirrels in 1981 and the other for cutting the sex organs off a bear in 1992. He said the first occurred when he was visiting from California, where hunting squirrels is legal, and the second was with his brother-in-law, whom he claimed was the one to cut off the bear's sex organs.
