He apparently didn't realize that it was important:
"is in his 60s, has fished since he was 15. The courts were told that he had no formal training but picked his fishing grounds by experience"
"he saw a chart showing a line running through his fishing area with the handwritten notation “abandonne.” He concluded his underwater nemesis was fair game and when he snagged it again in June of 2006, he pulled it up and sliced through it with an electric saw."
"Vallee heard that police were looking for the culprit. He came forward and made a voluntary statement."
Poor guy. He might be an idiot for just slicing some cable he dredged up, but possibly had neither the education nor the knowledge to understand what he was doing.
The willful negligence is not asking someone or saying something before slicing into an expensive looking underwater cable with a saw - which would take some time, preparation, and persistence.
And if it was actually abandoned, what was cutting it going to do for him anyway? Unless he removed the cable, he was going to keep snagging it in different areas.
This isn’t like cutting a corner pulling out of a parking lot and running over some flowers. This is like digging with a backhoe in front of your business to install some irrigation, and getting irritated at all those pesky cables and stuff underground. And rather than talking to someone about it, ripping them all out because ‘it didn’t look like anyone was using them’.
"is in his 60s, has fished since he was 15. The courts were told that he had no formal training but picked his fishing grounds by experience"
"he saw a chart showing a line running through his fishing area with the handwritten notation “abandonne.” He concluded his underwater nemesis was fair game and when he snagged it again in June of 2006, he pulled it up and sliced through it with an electric saw."
"Vallee heard that police were looking for the culprit. He came forward and made a voluntary statement."