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El Reg reports
A father who shot down a drone that was hovering over his family home in Kentucky has been cleared of all charges.
Dad-of-two William Merideth thought the quadcopter was spying on his daughters in their yard in Hillview and blasted the gizmo out of the sky with a shotgun. That earned him the title "Drone Slayer" from pro-privacy quarters.
Merideth was arrested shortly after in July and charged with criminal mischief and wanton endangerment.
He appeared before the Bullitt County District Court on Monday this week and after a two and a half hour hearing, Judge Rebecca Ward dismissed the case against him.
"I was in my right to protect my family and my property", said Merideth.
The judge agreed, telling the court: "He had a right to shoot at this drone."
David Boggs, who owned the downed drone, was hoping to get the cost of the machine in compensation and said he will ask the Commonwealth's Attorney's office to take the case to a grand jury--or consider pursuing a civil case against Merideth.
Previous: Man Arrested for Shooting Down Drone Flying Over His Property
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Thursday October 29 2015, @03:00PM
If only I hadn't seen the video evidence he mentions . All flight during that video, including the moment you see the drone lose control and fall to the ground (i.e.: when it was actually shot), was done at least at 200ft height.
No, doesn't look like that to me. Instead, it looks to me like someone who doesn't know how to interpret video evidence. Let's start with the obvious problem. The video is under 90 seconds long. The incident is over a longer time frame:
William Merideth, 47, was relaxing at his home in Hillview, Kentucky, US, on Sunday afternoon when his daughters told him a drone was flying over the neighborhood. The aircraft hovered low in his neighbor's garden, and then swung by his home.
"I went and got my shotgun and I said, 'I'm not going to do anything unless it's directly over my property,'" Merideth told WDRB News on Wednesday.
"Within a minute or so, here it came. It was hovering over top of my property, and I shot it out of the sky. I didn't shoot across the road, I didn't shoot across my neighbor's fences, I shot directly into the air."
Where's the missing video? What this probably means is that there were previous flights. You aren't seeing the whole story here.
Second, there's no actual measurement of altitude in the video. You conflate your opinion of the altitude with what the video actually shows. And third, given that the vehicle was actually shot down, that indicates it probably was not above 200 feet.
Fourth, the current altitude of the vehicle at the time it was shot is irrelevant. The whole point of the two other witnesses is that it establishes that the shooter's opinion that the drone was flying too low over his property was reasonable because others had the same opinion.