Bird and animal carcases found in a home freezer were the focus of an unsuccessful court battle to have 25 charges dropped against a woman accused of baiting and killing almost 100 birds of prey near Violet Town.
Dorothy Sloan, 82, of Violet Town is facing 342 charges.
They include eight charges of aggravated cruelty, 97 of killing wildlife by poison and 208 of possessing protected wildlife.
She also faces 25 charges of possessing wildlife taken from the wild, and it is these 25 charges that were under dispute in a hearing in Shepparton Magistrates’ Court.
Ms Sloan’s defence launched an application in the court to exclude some evidence under the Evidence Act on the basis it was obtained illegally; however, the application was denied by the magistrate and all charges will stand.
Much of the evidence directly related to bird and animal carcases found in the freezer at Ms Sloan’s house, as well as a handwritten note that said “gone to bait”.
The issue is a search warrant for a search of Ms Sloan’s house did not include a date for the cessation of the warrant; however, it did say it was valid for seven days.
The warrant was issued by a magistrate in Wangaratta Magistrates’ Court on August 23, 2019 — four days before the search.
The legal issue under discussion in the hearing directly related to 25 charges of possessing wildlife taken from the wild and would have meant they would have had to have been dropped.
Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning prosecutor Megan Tittensor told the court the case rose from a DELWP investigation into reports of 230 bird carcases in the area, including on land owned by Ms Sloan.
This included 151 wedge-tailed eagles, 59 other birds of prey including raptors, falcons and whistling kites, as well as other birds.
She said the dead birds were “primarily concentrated on or near Sloan land, particularly part of a property that was used for lambing”.
Testing on some animals and eight birds found the presence of an insecticide.
The prosecution alleges some of the birds had been shot, butchered and injected with poison and left out as bait for birds of prey to eat.
Defence barrister Charles Morgan, however, argued that the mistake on the warrant should have been picked up and corrected before Ms Sloan’s house was searched.
Mr Morgan argued that a warrant issued by the courts to allow authorities to enter a person’s home was “a serious bit of paper” that was “not to be taken lightly or flippantly”.
Ms Tittensor, however, argued that the desirability of including the evidence found during the warrant outweighed the undesirability of not doing so.
Magistrate Marita Altman found that while the warrant was invalid because it did not include the date, the omission of the date was “inadvertent or careless”.
As such she ruled the evidence should be allowed to be included in any case against Ms Sloan as the “probative value” of what was found in the house was high.
Ms Sloan will next appear in court in February.
She has not entered a plea on any of the charges.