Court overturns conviction of Montana man who killed grizzly

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned the conviction of a Montana man who shot and killed a protected grizzly bear near Ronan in 2014, ruling that he should have been able to claim that he acted in self-defense.

The three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Brian Charette's case back to U.S. District Court, where he had been convicted of unlawfully taking a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The judges said U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch set the wrong standard for a self-defense claim in Charette's 2016 bench trial. The magistrate judge ruled that to claim self-defense, Charette must have had an objectively reasonable belief that he was protecting himself or others from danger.
But the appellate panel, citing a ruling in a previous case, said the magistrate judge should have used a subjective standard, which would have allowed Charette to claim self-defense based only on a "good-faith belief" that he was protecting himself or others, even if that belief was unreasonable.
Faced with the higher "objective" standard, Charette chose not to testify in his defense at trial, the 9th circuit opinion said.
"It is difficult to fathom how Charette could raise an effective self-defense claim without testifying as to his mental state when he decided to shoot the bear," Judge Richard Tallman wrote in the opinion.
The ruling does not completely clear Charette. The opinion notes that while federal regulations allow grizzly bears to be killed in self-defense, they also require that such a killing must be reported within five days.
Charette did not report the shooting to authorities "because he did not want to go through the hassle," according to the 9th Circuit decision.
That will be an issue for Lynch to address when the case goes back to his court.
Charette initially denied and later admitted to shooting the bear after his ex-wife's new boyfriend told police about it in December 2014.
Charette told investigators that three bears had been harassing his horses in a pasture about 30 yards (27 meters) from his home that May. He said he shot and killed one of the bears when it chased his dogs toward the home and appeared to be climbing a fence into his yard.
Charette and a friend tied the bear's carcass to a truck, dragged it away from the property and buried it in a field.