one for the dogs

So, the life of a lesbian, ok, a woman, even an attractive, vigorous, healthy middle class woman, and even in San Francisco, isn't worth a dog's life, to the dog's owner. What's next, the murderers suing the murdered for lack of the canine companionship of the euthanized dogs? Accounts from early this year of the horrorible assault and of the owners' culpability left little to the imagination or to reasonable doubt.

The five-week trial gripped much of the nation as prosecutors described a horrific attack in which Whipple was bitten all over her body -- her throat ripped, her clothes torn off -- by at least one of the dogs.

The jury of seven men and five women saw graphic photos of the victim's ravaged body, with wounds visible from her ankles to her face, and pictures of the blood-stained hallway where the attack occurred.
....
Don Newton, the jury foreman, said the number of prior incidents involving the dogs undermined the defense claim that the mauling was nothing more than a tragic accident.

"It was a series of actions -- a series of failures to heed warnings, a series of careless taking of the dogs out and allowing them to lunge at people and attack people, that they had fallen into a pattern of actions which were inevitably leading to this result," Newton said.

In today's report, once again the defendent present when the dogs attacked that fatal day, ". . . insisted she had no idea her 'loving' pets were capable of such an attack."

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Published on June 17, 2002 4:17 PM.

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