PETER HITCHENS: Bizarre case of the dead deer that proves the jobsworth class have forgotten who they are meant to serve

It is amazing what is legal. For example, politicians are free to tell flat lies in their campaigns, and nothing will happen to them.But it is sometimes just as astounding to find out what is illegal. For instance, it is an actual crime to pick up a dead deer from the roadside and take it home to eat it. Yes, it really is, as photographer Guy Carpenter has recently discovered in detail.Most of us know that you are not supposed to run deer over so that you can carry them off, but that is a bit different.Let me explain how absurd the law is. When the same deer was alive and gambolling happily by the road, right up to the moment when it was killed, it legally belonged to nobody.As it breathed its last, its carcass instantly became the property of whoever owned the land on which it lay (we'll get to that). And so begins a sad, rather stupid story with a happy ending.Like all newspaper columnists, I receive distressing letters from readers, asking for help in some ghastly, miserable problem. Usually, I cannot help them, which makes it worse.Modern British officialdom is harder and less flexible than it once was. It is tough with the weak, and feeble with the strong. It is peopled with dogmatic liberals who have no trace of a sense of humour – nor any sense of proportion.It follows rules designed to remove almost all initiative. So it often cannot see what is wrong with itself. Many unpleasant or thoughtless people are not as afraid of publicity as you might think. They just do not realise how stupid they will look if the issue hits the headlines. It is an actual crime to pick up a dead deer from the roadside and take it home to eat it as photographer Guy Carpenter has recently discovered in detailBut when Mr Carpenter wrote to me in August, I thought I should be able to assist. He is 42, a photographer, a quiet man who lives in a small North Yorkshire village on good terms with his neighbours. He told me he had been charged under the Deer Act of 1991. I checked, as far as I could, and could find no other such prosecution – anywhere, ever. There was never any suggestion that Mr Carpenter had been poaching. That is covered by other laws.He was eventually charged under Section 1(2) of the Act. This law specifically provides a defence where someone genuinely believes the landowner would have consented had they known the circumstances. This is what Mr Carpenter did believe. He had not himself killed it. Some other driver had done that, and gone whizzing off.I did not even know that his action was illegal when he described it to me. Would you have done? I am quite sure that the law was not designed to make life into a torment of sleeplessness and distress for a man like Mr Carpenter, who spent several weeks afraid of being branded with a criminal record for the rest of his life.We are not talking here about some tremendous antlered beast, of the sort that the late Queen used to stalk so skilfully near Balmoral.The animal was about the size of a large dog. Mr Carpenter reckoned he could butcher it into several reasonable meals. But no. As he was picking it up from beside the A66 near Barnard Castle, a police car appeared, as they never do when you need them.The car belonged to the Durham Constabulary (Mr Carpenter lives close to the boundary between Durham and Yorkshire) and they stopped and began to question him.Matters swiftly became deadly serious.Did he not know that it was illegal? Well, no actually, he didn't. Well, it was illegal. So he put it back, muttering that it was a bit of a shame.You might think it would have ended there. But after some to-and-fro, none of it rude or aggressive, the police said he'd be hearing from them. And he did.A letter plopped on to his doormat, announcing that he was being taken to court. It alleged that he did 'without the consent of the owner/occupier of the land, remove the carcass of a deer'.I'm not sure the police even knew for sure who was the owner or occupier of the land. They seem to have thought it was Durham County Council. But later it turned out that because the A66 is a trunk route, it belonged instead to the nationalised Highways Agency.Not that it mattered much. Neither the Council nor the Agency wanted to feast on roast venison at their HQs, with plenty of redcurrant sauce and a bottle or two of good red Burgundy. The illegal carcass was taken back to Barnard Castle police station, where it was then picked up by a council contractor – at a cost to the taxpayer of about £300.How futile. I never got the impression that the Highways Agency cared very much at all what happened to it.But, for some reason, the police just wouldn't let the matter drop. I tried quite hard to alert their press office to the absurdity of it when they had so many unsolved burglaries on their books. But they were quite unmoved.And then, boom, it came to court at Peterlee Magistrates, on September 7, exactly three months after the super-vigilant deer police swooped on Mr Carpenter on the A66.And prosecutors seem to have woken for the first time to the ludicrousness of what they were doing. They offered an 'out of court settlement', which most people would have assumed was a caution. Darren Grimes, deputy leader of Durham County Council and a leading Reform politician, joined Peter Hitchens' failed attempt to get the police to listenMr Carpenter did not much want that, as it involved him admitting to a crime, which he did not believe he had committed. The main local newspaper, the Northern Echo, reported the case prominently, noting that Mr Carpenter had called the prosecution an attempt to 'criminalise a law-abiding and responsible member of society'.They dwelt on the toll on his health and the lack of any clear beneficiary from the prosecution. Public reaction in the region was hostile.And that, I suspect, is why a few days ago the Crown Prosecution Service finally dropped the whole stupid thing.Mr Carpenter is now a free man – without a stain on his character, but stung by a large legal bill.Darren Grimes, deputy leader of Durham County Council and a leading Reform politician, joined my failed attempt to get the police to listen.After it was all over, he summed up the absurdity very well. He said: 'People are told regularly that resources are stretched. They are told there isn't the capacity to attend a burglary, or to do much about the quad bikes going missing off farms, the illegal bikes in our residential areas, or the shoplifting that has become effectively decriminalised on our high streets.'Those same people are now watching officers, lawyers and a magistrates' court spend months on a dead deer that nobody wanted, that nobody owned in any meaningful sense.'Well, quite. I am amazed that the Durham Police had to make fools of themselves in court before realising that this was a silly case, as well as a nasty one.They couldn't seem to grasp it. Modern public bodies have now become so remote from the rest of us that they have forgotten who they serve.Instead, they obey wooden rules right up to the moment when those rules let them down. How can we get the police back on our side?