CHEYENNE - The recent acquittal of a Douglas man who had been charged with trespassing for "corner jumping" to get from one piece of public land to another could have far-reaching effects on sportsmen's access throughout the state.

"I don't rejoice over one of our officers losing in court, but for sportsmen certainly, this is news, you betcha," said Wyoming Game and Fish Department spokesman Jeff Obrecht.

At the very least, the Albany County case will likely prompt the department to review its long-standing assumption that corner jumping is illegal, said agency Wildlife Enforcement Coordinator Russ Pollard.

"I'm sure that we will revisit the issue, but I have no idea what the outcome's going to be, what direction we will get from our administration," Pollard said.

Corner jumping is the term officials used to describe stepping over the corner created where four sections of land meet in order to reach a cater-corner parcel of land without touching the other two parcels.

Albany County Circuit Judge Robert Castor's "not guilty" verdict in the case against Bill Kearney does not set a legal precedent on the issue, but it raises the possibility that public lands in Wyoming may be more accessible to the public than previously thought.

While hunting in Albany County on Sept. 23, Kearney stepped from one parcel of public land to another that meet at a corner where two pieces of private land also meet.

Using a Global Positioning System (GPS) device, Kearney found a surveyor's pin that marks the official corner of the land parcels, and he did not step in or physically touch the adjacent private lands when he stepped over the corner.

"I did this, and I was accosted by a landowner and a Game and Fish representative on public land," Kearney said. "They asked how I got there, and I told them, and they told me that was against the law in Wyoming. … I couldn't believe that was true, because I never stepped on private land."

Nearly a month later, Kearney was cited for trespassing for the purpose of hunting, and he got the feeling that the landowner, Serge Delia, held some sway with state authorities.

"From my overall experience, it appeared to me that the Game and Fish was under a tremendous amount of pressure by this very wealthy hobby rancher to prosecute me for accessing thousands of acres of public land," Kearney said.

He said he decided to challenge the citation in court, because he didn't think he had broken the law. Castor agreed, and on March 24, after a bench trial, the judge found Kearney not guilty of trespassing.

"It's unfortunate that I had to waste a couple of days of elk hunting and my own money to see this through, but it was a matter of principle," Kearney said.

He said he spoke prior to trial with several people he knew in government, including Game and Fish officials, and their unanimous feedback was that what Kearney had done was prohibited.

Obrecht said that opinion has always been the conventional wisdom on corner jumping.

"In the sporting realm that I'm in, it was just kind of common knowledge or commonly accepted that corner jumping was off-limits," he said. "That was always pre-GPS, too."

But Kearney's attorney and the prosecutor could find no definitive answer in Wyoming case law to interpret whether corner jumping was deemed illegal.

"There's nothing specifically on this point," said the prosecutor, Deputy Albany County Attorney Torey Racines. "There's case law from other states, and there's arguments made on both sides as to what the law should be."

Kearney said Racines described as an "urban myth" the widely held assumption that corner jumping had been previously declared illegal.

In court documents, Racines noted that Wyoming law specifically grants landowners the ownership of the space above their lands, and even the U.S. Supreme Court grants landowners ownership of "at least as much of the space above the ground as they can occupy or use in connection with the land."

On the other hand, a recent Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling stated that there is "no place in the modern world" for the ancient civil trespass doctrine that "he who owns the soil owns upward unto heaven."

Pollard noted that Castor's decision is not binding in any other Wyoming county. Racines added that the judge did not even give a reason for his decision, which makes the basis for his finding unclear.

Racines said his agency will continue to review similar cases on a case-by-case basis rather than refuse to prosecute future cases that mirror the Kearney case.

Kearney, meanwhile, is left pondering what effects the case may have on public lands access and what the reactions of public lands agencies will be.

"I'm happy that I was cleared of it, but it's really unclear what this 'not guilty' verdict means," he said. "If this isn't binding to the state of Wyoming as it should be and it takes legislation to do it, I'd like to see somebody step up to the plate to do it."