CRIME & PUNISHMENT
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:
Crimes Against Animals
Alleged pet thieves David Harold
Stephens, Tracy Lynn Stephens, and Brenda
Arlene Linville were scheduled for trial
November 2 in Eugene, Oregon, on charges
that they obtained dogs and cats by promising
to find them good homes and then sold them
for use in biomedical research. Customers
included Oregon Health Sciences University,
Oregon State University, the University of
Nevada at Reno, and the Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.
Originally charged under state legislation, the
trio were recharged under the Animal Welfare
Act after sheriff’s deputies and state and fed-
eral agents raided their kennels. Their
activites were brought to the attention of the
various authorities via detective work by
Bobbie Michaels of Committed to Animal
Protection, Education, and Rescue, a
Portland-based activist group.
Mark Leach, 43, of Oxford,
England, was fined $1,600 on October 10 for
strangling an Amazonian blue-fronted parrot
belonging to one Paddy Williams. Williams
had trained the parrot to screech Leach’s name
up to 100 times a day at a sound level of
nearly 90 decibels. Williams has already
acquired a new parrot.
A Parma, Ohio, jury on October
7 found Broadview Heights city council mem-
ber William Navratil not guilty of cruelty and
illegal possession of a game animal, in con-
nection with a July 5 incident in which
Navratil and constituent James Fair admitted-
ly bludgeoned a raccoon with a baseball bat
and a shovel. Afterward, Navratil offered the
corpse to mayor Leo Bender as meat for a
barbeque. Fair and a third man charged in
connection with the killing, Thomas Levak,
were to be tried later.
Rural Wisconsin civil court judge
John H. Lussow recently dismissed a lawsuit
against a raccoon hunter whose dogs killed a
cat because of what he called a lack of evi-
dence and a lack of precedent to establish that
a cat has value. “We had an autopsy report
that gave the cat’s death as ‘being shaken in
the mouth of a larger animal,'” plaintiff Sally
Boulware told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “My
husband and I heard the attack, waited for the
hunters to emerge from the woods, and found
the cat’s body where the shots had been fired,”
that alerted the Boulwares to the presence of
the hunters, on posted land. “The hunter had
been with his 13-year-old daughter when they
killed our cat, He brought her to court. So
she learned in a court of law that it’s okay to
trespass, to kill animals, and to lie.”
Ivan Pope, 29, of Chichester,
West Sussex, England, was convicted in late
September of violating the British humane
slaughter law by frightening a chicken before
strangling and crushing it while re-enacting a
Mayan ritual. Pope, who subsequently
became a vegetarian, was fined and barred
from keeping animals for three years.
Mary Jane Richards, of Cleve-
land Heights, Ohio, pleaded guilty to
attempted animal abuse September 30, six
and a half months after the city of Cleveland
demolished her feces-filled home as a health
hazard with 75 cats still inside. Now living
with her mother, Richards has reportedly
resumed collecting cats.
Dorothy Rider, 71, of Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, made local TV news in late
September when local police were unable to
find a law they could use to remove an esti-
mated 60 cats from her rented trailer
home––reportedly swarming with maggots
and caked with excrement..
Malahat, British Columbia land-
lord Fehim Bajric was fined $600 on
September 9 for shooting a kitten belonging
to one of his tenants. It was Bajric’s first con-
viction, although he admitted in court to
shooting 20 to 30 cats and three or four dogs
per year, ostensibly to protect his own freely
roaming ducks, geese, and rabbits.
Activism
Concerned Citizens for Anim-
als, of Springfield, Massachusetts, recent-
ly won summary dismissal of a six-count
slander suit filed agaist the group two years
ago by Max Zeller Furs Inc. CCA’s coun-
tersuit against Zeller is scheduled for trial
on January 5, 1993.
Information on how to fight
SLAPP suits (slander and defamation suits
filed by targets of protest to suppress criti-
cism) is available from:
• SLAPP Resource Center,
University of Denver College of Law,
1900 Olive St., Denver, CO 80220;
• Coalition Against Malicious
Lawsuits, P.O. Box 751, Valley Stream,
NY 11582;
• First Amendment Project /
California Anti-SLAPP Project, 1611
Telegraph Ave., Suite 1200, Oakland, CA
94612-2146.
Chris DeRose, founder of Last
Chance for Animals, and fellow activists
Aaron Leider, Regina Eshelman, and John
Wheatley were sentenced October 2 for
their part in vandalizing a UCLA research
laboratory and releasing animals on April
21, 1988. Convicted of criminal misde-
meanors at a 1989 jury trial, the four were
not sentenced immediately because appeals
were spending. Derose and Leider each
drew 90 days in jail, while Eshelman and
Wheatley got two years on probation plus
100 hours of community service.
