COURT CALENDAR

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

Crimes against humans
Preliminary hearings began
January 30 in Chicago in the case of Marsha
Norskog, of Palos Hills, vs. Roger and Gayle
Pfiel, of Crete Township. In October 1995 the
Pfiel’s son Steven, 19, drew 100 years for the
July 14, 1993 thrill-killing of Norskog’s daughter
Hillary, 13, and the March 1995 bludgeoning/slashing
murder of his brother Roger, then
19. Norskog contends in a potential landmark
case that Steven Pfiel’s history of sadistic animal
killing gave his parents ample warning that
their son was a threat to commit murder, but
that instead of dealing with his violent tendencies,
they encouraged him to hunt and gave
him the car and hunting knife he used to kill
Hillary. Roger Pfiel is a meatpacking executive.

Vicki Welch, a former tenant on
the estate of murder suspect John du Pont,
said she wasn’t surprised by du Pont’s alleged
murder of Olympic wrestler David Schultz on
January 26, because in early 1981 she and her
young sons witnessed du Pont dynamiting a fox
den full of kits.

Conservation rulings
Judge Thomas Aquilino of the U.S.
Court of International Trade on January 5
ordered the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and
Commerce “to prohibit not later than May 1,
1996 the importation of shrimp or products of
shrimp wherever harvested in the wild with
commercial fishing technology which may
affect adversely” protected sea turtles. Said
Earth Island Institute sea turtle project leader
Todd Steiner, “This decision will save more
than 100,000 sea turtles from needlessly
drowning in shrimp nets every year, ending the
largest killing of an endangered species occurring
in the world right now.” The decision was
also hailed by some shrimpers, who have long
held that if they have to tow turtle exclusion
devices in their nets, foreign competitors
should be under the same obligation.
National Marine Fisheries Service
biologist William T. Hogarth t e s t i f i e d
December 20 that Atlantic weakfish catches are
down 85% since 1983, but U.S. district judge
Robert Doumar nonetheless suspended enforcement
of a federal ban on catching weakfish
along the North Carolina coast, their primary
habitat. The North Carolina Marine Fisheries
Commission has advanced an alternative proposal
that would allow weakfishing–– with nets
having wide enough mesh to allow immature
fish to escape.