For pure reading enjoyment, Oregon Court of Appeals opinions aren’t in the same league as Harry Potter novels. Occasionally, though, the court produces something like last week’s very brief (six pages) decision in State of Oregon vs. Rachael Dawn Wakefield, which accomplishes two things. It applies common sense — and, it turns out, justice — where both were sorely needed. And it suggests that judges, too, can have fun.

The case involves a slingshot, a glass marble, a bus stop and an impressive overreaction by prosecutors.

On Dec. 11, 2015, writes Appeals Court Judge Robyn Ridler Aoyagi, Rachael Wakefield “decided to try her hand at using a slingshot.” She did so by shooting a glass marble at a bus shelter near the parking lot of a Walgreens store.

Coincidentally, Marion County sheriff’s Deputy Lane happened to be driving through the lot “at the very moment that defendant did the deed.”

Aoyagi is writing for a three-judge panel, and her tongue-in-cheek language immediately suggests what she goes on to explain: This is a minor offense that should not have gotten this far.

From a distance of about 50 feet, Aoyagi continues, the deputy “observed a blue Toyota Corolla approaching the bus shelter” as it traveled down the road. It slowed, and as it pulled up next to the shelter, Wakefield leaned out of a window and fired something at it with a slingshot from a distance of four to five feet. Lane “heard a ‘thud’ when the projectile hit the bus shelter.”

The deputy stopped the car and confiscated the slingshot as a second deputy “went to the bus shelter to assess the consequences of defendant’s misdeed.” There weren’t any, and the glass marble had shattered upon hitting the Plexiglas shelter and fallen to the ground.

Still, Wakefield was charged with recklessly endangering another person. Worse, a jury convicted her.

A reckless endangerment conviction requires prosecutors to demonstrate that a defendant “was aware of and consciously disregarded a substantial and unjustifiable risk that her conduct would cause serious physical injury to another person.” This contention verges on absurd in Wakefield’s case.

As Aoyagi explains, there was no evidence that her conduct (“sling-shooting a marble into a vacant Plexiglas bus shelter from a distance of four to five feet with no one in the immediate vicinity”) threatened to injure anyone.

Yet the prosecution tried to make the case that Wakefield’s plinking of Plexiglas was, for legal purposes, comparable to an episode considered by the state Appeals Court in 1998.

That incident involved the resident of a Portland duplex who fired 15 bullets from two guns into the ceiling and front door of his home. The bullets entered the upstairs unit and penetrated the front door, potentially endangering others, as the Court of Appeals explained in upholding a reckless-endangerment conviction.

Shooting a bullet through a door. Shooting a marble at an empty bus station. Same thing!

Or, as Aoyagi more charitably explains, that’s “a different type of scenario than exists here.”

The court’s evisceration of Wakefield’s conviction is a relief, and Aoyagi’s opinion is good reading. But there’s a larger lesson for anyone tempted to dispense with common sense and engage in “misguided amusement” of dubious legality: Don’t be quick to assume that a prosecutor or jury will automatically demonstrate more common sense than you.