New Pa. shield in hunting accidents
HARRISBURG - Pennsylvania property owners who allow hunting on their land are now shielded from lawsuits over accidents involving victims off the property, under a bill that Gov. Rendell has signed into law.
HARRISBURG - Pennsylvania property owners who allow hunting on their land are now shielded from lawsuits over accidents involving victims off the property, under a bill that Gov. Rendell has signed into law.
Landowners who allow the free use of their property for recreational activities - such as hunting, fishing, swimming and hiking - have been protected from liability for accidents for more than four decades.
The bill Rendell signed Saturday, prompted by a bizarre hunting accident in Lehigh County in 2004, extends that protection for hunting even when the victim is in a distant location.
"Farmers now can be more confident that their livelihood won't be at risk when they open their land to hunters," who help control wildlife that causes crop damage, said Carl T. Shaffer, president of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau.
The revision to the Recreational Use of Land and Water Act, which was approved unanimously by both houses of the legislature, was developed after a Lehigh County orchardist was successfully sued for the shooting of a pregnant woman by a man who was hunting deer on the farmland.
Casey Burns was 18 in November 2004 when she was accidentally shot in the head by a hunter who was more than a half-mile away.
Burns' skull was fractured and the gunshot left bullet fragments and bone in her brain. She suffered long-term complications; her child was born healthy in February 2005.
A Lehigh County Court jury later ruled that hunter Craig T. Wetzel was 90 percent negligent. The property owner who gave Wetzel permission to hunt, Daniel W. Haas, was deemed 10 percent negligent. Burns settled the lawsuit on undisclosed terms.
Wetzel received probation and a five-year hunting ban after pleading guilty to violating state hunting laws.
