You've got to love criminal law
Much of the time, the cops would rather have clear laws because they don't enjoy getting their cases overturned. More laws are passed all of the time. It's really difficult to keep track of all of them, much less relate them to existing laws when the pieces don't quite fit. In some cases, the law is vague in order to give the officer some leeway. I'd say the instance with the abalone and the 10" gauge was not really a gray area unless the gauge was not capable of accurately measuring a 7" shell. The spirit of that law is obviously to keep people from taking abalone under 7", which is the legal minimum, but taken literally, the guy was in the wrong if he did nto have such a device. The code section does not specify that the gauge can only be 7", just that the device should be able to measure that length. However, in the spirit of the law, the warden should have noted that the abs were of the proper size and warned the guy that he needed a gauge within the specifications. A citation was a bit overkill, but I say that without knowing the particulars. Maybe the warden was new on the job, or in a bad mood, or the diver provoked him. Did the warden confiscate anything, or just issue the ticket?
