There was a moment in Courtroom 108 when time ground to a halt, the way it only can during a long morning sacrificed to the legal system. On the bench, Cook County Circuit Judge Shelley Sutker-Dermer stared silently at a document, her lips pursed. A dry cough. Keys clanked in the hands of a sheriff's deputy. The shoes of a bow-tied attorney squeaked across the gray carpet. The ventilation system cycled air tinged with a hint of dust and sorrow; 10:38 a.m. on a recent Thursday at the Skokie courthouse.
A group of 21 people shifted in the beige wooden pews. They'd been here for 90 minutes, and would be here for 90 minutes more. Unlike everyone else in the room, they were not employees of Cook County, nor accused criminals, nor their lawyers or family.
Rather, they were court observers from the Garrido Stray Rescue Foundation, a group founded by former Chicago cop John Garrido and his wife, Anna. Silent witnesses for abused animals like Betty, the dog we met Wednesday, whose former owner, Anita Damodaran, slipped into the courtroom and took a back pew with her father, her face hidden by a medical mask.
She was arrested in Florida in December and brought back to Illinois to face a charge of aggravated animal cruelty, accused of leaving her dog to suffer uncared for in a plastic bin for a month.
Three hours is a long time to sit in court on behalf of a dog you never met. Why do this?
"Just to make sure the animals have a voice," said Paula Conrad, who took a half-day off from her job at Exelon to be here. "The folks from Garrido handle 10 to 12 cases actively. Dogs and cats — if they're being abused by the people who adopted them, there's no one else going to be there."
A lawyer representing the defendant in another abuse case that morning — a woman whoaccused of stabbing? stabbed a chihuahua being walked by a stranger — smiled at the group as he walked out of the courtroom.
"They're good people," said the lawyer, Tod Urban, quickly adding, "I'm a dog owner." A Great Dane named Penny Lane. He said his own client "is not an evil person. Just has some mental health issues."
That also seems to be the choice regarding Damodaran. Is she, in the words of one observer, "an evil heartless monster" who should be in prison? Or a woman with mental problems who needs compassion?
"I require information regarding her mental health," said Sutker-Dermer, denying the prosecution request that she be jailed, but imposing a curfew.
"I think she deserves jail time for what she did to that animal," said Conrad. "This was sustained torture of this dog, to keep it sealed in a box. It survived by eating its own feces and drinking its own urine."
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I struggle with the punish/help dichotomy of dealing with criminals, especially perpetrators of heinous crimes like this. An evil like this is mental illness almost by definition, right? What does punishment achieve? Societal revenge and a sense of resolution? Hopefully some level of deterrence for others, but I don't think it's very effective. In the case of animal abuse the victim certainly doesn't care or understand that their abuser was put in jail.
ReplyDeleteWhere I land I guess, is some kind of balance, maybe re-education camp in place of a prison. Temporary removal from society while a person is receiving help. I think it should be acknowledged that the person committed an unacceptable act and needs to be in a time out and made to understand and accept it and never do it again. But their humanity also needs to be acknowledged, something went off the rails for them to do this and they do need help to get back on track. It's a hard balance to find, many of us just want revenge.
Mental illness is a terrible illness to suffer from.If you can care for yourself, your children and apparently your patients you treat but not your dog? That you suffer only in the treatment of a dog? I say phony baloney. Using mental illness as a defense insults those who have mental illness. For a physician to try to use that excuse is even worse.
ReplyDeleteThere is such a duality to man.
ReplyDeleteI find us trapped in some sort of purgatory. We never advance enough to make it to a higher plane while also failing to fall to a deeper darker place.
and then i look around at what is going on outside of this courtroom and fill my buck.
I love your response to those who want to restrict our charity to humans; thank you It is more than unfortunate that the safety net in this country is so unpredictable and arbitrary, and becoming more so, that people in need must rely on equally unpredictable private charity. I steadfastly support a homeless agency in the West Loop, ReVive Center, but lately more and more of my charitable donations go to animals. When I'm done here I will be donating to the Garrido foundation.
ReplyDeleteSo she's not going to the slammer for animal abuse and animal cruelty? Sorry to hear that, Mr. S. You have previously mentioned the veterans court and the drug court. Not sure if we have that here, in Ohio. Probably not. So pardon my unfamiliarity with those Illinois justice systems. Does their punishment include any jail time? Or just counseling or rehab and maybe, in the worst cases, the shrinks? This case certainly warrants more than any of those outcomes.
ReplyDeleteAs an animal lover, who grew up with dogs and who has had the pleasure of the company of cats for more than forty years, I want to see her punished. Prison time. She deserves no less. And it might act as a deterrent to other potential abusers, although that is secondary, in this instance..
What she did was horrible. Would it have been worse if they had found a dead dog, rather than a live one? Probably not...the dog was alive, and suffering horribly. What was worse...the piles of corpses at the death camps, or the suffering survivors, who were at least out of their misery? My neighbor in Skokie said the latter...he was among the liberators, in 1945. Heard his stories as a kid. They haunt me to this day.
But on the other hoof, incarceration would affect the doctor's young children. Where are they now? Who is caring for them? If she is found guilty but mentally ill, and unfit to stand trial (assuming there is one on the docket), perhaps a mental hospital is the final solution (see what I did there?)
What I fear most is that she will be ordered to seek help and then allowed to leave the jurisdiction of Illinois and to return to Tampa, which amounts to no more than a slap on the wrist. Who would make it stick? The State of Florida? Would they even care?
And I'm guessing their animal cruelty laws are less strict than the ones in Illinois. Hey, it's red-state Florida. No need for me to go there. The awful truth is, she is probably going to get away with it. As a medical professional, she at least deserves to not be allowed to practice. A kick in the wallet might wake her up a bit.
One very important piece of information is missing here: testimony from defendant , Damodaran, which I'm sure her attorney scotched. "I'm sorry, I forgot the dog" isn't going to go over very well contrasted with the vivid and dramatic testimony from the movers willing to testify to the deplorable condition of the poor animal. But I'm sure that is pretty much what Damodaran would say. The dog was way down on the list of things that Damodaran had to do that day. She put the dog in a crate, which generally would comfortably serve as a den like enclosure. But then she forgot, left the dog unfed, unwalked and confined for hours, then days...irresponsibly. She shouldn't have had a dog -- that was her mental health issue.
ReplyDeletejohn
This case is unquestionably horrific. The intersection of mental illness and the law varies from state to state and through time. When John Hinkley was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the attempted assassination of Reagan, the public howled over the injustice. (he spent 34 years in a psych facility instead of prison). But the jury only had 2 choices at the time.... guilty, or not guilty by reason of insanity. A lot of changes to forensic psychiatry were made after that verdict. The biggest one was the option of "Guilty but mentally ill" (GBMI) . Most states have that option now.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, it seems like almost every time a politician is caught on the wrong side of the law, they immediately check themselves into a rehab facility, in hopes of shaving off years of their sentence (ok, that's cynical).
But the reality is that the use of the insanity defense, even before John Hinkley, was far lower than public perception. There are still a handful of states that do not have the GBMI verdict option. They also happen to be states that embrace the death penalty!
Although we don't know the particulars re: Betty v Damodaran, as humans we can't help but react. It's also difficult to not speculate or judge.
I am very worried about those children.
ReplyDeleteSo am I. They were witness to this act, and now have it embedded in their psyche that this is normal.
DeleteI hate to bring this up, but could it be a cultural difference? I was once married to a foreigner who told me that they used cats and dogs for soccer practice in his country and that having animals living in the home was a horrible quirk of Americans, he found it disgusting.. I wonder if this woman had not grown up here and had a similar disregard for animals, And how did this dog even come into her care? I had grown up with pets and loved the one I had at the time of our marriage, then she began to exhibit odd behaviors. I can't be sure but I know he hated her and I suspected he was abusing her. I agree it is horrible and there are people who also need to be rescued, but they can speak and complain, animals are voiceless. And don't get me started and where hamburgers come from.
ReplyDelete