Dropping the hammer on illegal gaming
By JARED PUTNAM Union Sentinel Editor

Sentinel photo/Jared Putnam DA Stan Gunter looks on as Blairsville Police Chief Johnny Carroll takes a swing.

The Union County District Attorney's Office is making it known that illegal gaming machines will not be tolerated.

Enotah Judicial Circuit District Attorney Stan Gunter tried to help make that perfectly clear as he watched Blairsville Chief of Police Johnny Carroll destroy three such machines last week. Under Georgia law, the machines are to be destroyed in the district attorney's presence.

"I want to get the point across to the public out there that these machines, in and of themselves, are illegal," Gunter said. "It doesn't matter if they are using them for gambling purposes. If they are, that's a whole other crime. They are just like non-tax-payed whiskey or marijuana. They are to be destroyed and the possession of them is a crime [in Georgia.] If anyone runs across them, please report that to local law enforcement so they can deal with that. The state of Georgia hasn't legalized gambling except for the lottery. While that is the state of the law, that's just how it goes and that is what we are going to enforce."

A lineup machine is any kind of machine with items that line up; horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. "Basically how these machines work is the numbers, letters, or symbols scroll by and they come to a stop," Gunter said. "The object is to try to match the symbols in a row. You have the opportunity to press the button one more time and one row will scroll over again. This is what that industry describes as a 'skill stop,' which would make the machines legal if that were true, but I have a case law that says that is not true. There is no skill to pushing a button. It is a random generation."

The machines destroyed last week were actually seized a couple of years ago, but the case had been tied up in court until recently. Gunter was driving home from work one night and stopped to get gas at a convenience store inside the city. When he went in he noticed the machines in the corner.

"They appeared to be illegal under the Georgia code and I reported that to the clerk," Gunter said. He also reported what he had seen to the Blairsville Police Department and asked them to seize the machines. The young clerk could have been arrested, but Gunter did not pursue that action. "I'm sure he had no idea [that they were illegal,]" Gunter said.

Store owners, on the other hand, had been warned. "Prior to that I had been sending out notices to owners of convenience stores that these machines were illegal and telling them that if they had them in there to get them out and there would be nothing else said about it," Gunter said. He asked law enforcement to give stores 10 days to remove the machines. "Folks had warning about this, so when I saw those machines, that's when I directed [law enforcement] to take them and seize them."

According to the district attorney, South Carolina had been having a big problem with the machines and when they declared them illegal, they were being dumped into Georgia. At the time Georgia had no laws to deal with them. The Georgia Legislature later clarified the law, declaring them illegal.

But Gunter said that in some cases it is not the convenience store that is willfully doing something wrong. "The people that own the machines are telling the store owners that these machines are legal," he said. "They cite the very code that the legislature adopted declaring them illegal. They differ on the interpretation of that code."

The machines in the local case belonged to a third party not affiliated with the convenience store. They were leased to the store. Gunter said that under the law he could have simply destroyed the machines, but in order to give the owner of the machines notice that he intended to do that, Gunter asked for an order declaring the machines contraband under the statute and that he intended to destroy them.

The dispute went to court, where Judge Hugh Stone ruled in the state's favor, saying that the machines were in fact contraband and should be destroyed. The owners of the machines asked for a new trial, but Judge Stone issued an order denying the motion for a new trial. An appeal was not filed within 30 days, bringing the dispute to a conclusion.