Brook had come for a visit,
and he and I decided to walk around the subdivision. When I picked up a walking
stick, Brook wondered why. Knowing him, he was thinking about a new study
suggesting that unstable gait may be one of the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer’s,
which has appeared in our maternal line. I’m 65, but I think I’m spry. “It’s for dogs,” I explained. I can’t hit a
dog with bear spray on a windy day. But my law practice had brought me several
reasons to be leery of dogs.
The first troubled dog I met
was “Bear,” who had been de-accessioned by the City of Seattle and donated to
the City of Snoqualmie where I lived. A Seattle officer told me, “Oh yeah. We
had to get rid of him because he had a tendency to bite people in the crotch.”
A less skilled dog-handler who could have given
us trouble was an officer of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in the airport at
Guam. My friend Linda Wilson and I were heading home from a diving and
snorkeling trip to Palau and Yap. Officers held dogs on leashes that were
sniffing incoming luggage, and they zeroed in on Linda’s bag. I knew Linda was a free spirit, but I thought
her drug of choice was cigarettes, and her only pills were cold tablets for an
awful infection she’d caught on our trip. “Is that your suitcase?” the officer
asked. She nodded. “You have dogs at
home, don’t you?” he said.
The dog that wounded one of
my clients seriously was a privately-owned large male German Shepherd. It had
been trained in the “Schutzhund” style: Unlike a drug dog or a dead body dog
that sits down and smiles when it finds its target, it was an attack dog that
wouldn’t let go until somebody said the “Out” command, in German, “Aus!” The
dog was a dangerous weapon, but the woman who owned it treated it with the
nonchalance of a fashion accessory. She
did not maintain its training, but a properly disciplined dog requires constant
drilling.
My client was a teenager who came to the owner’s house to call her
little sister home for supper. As they
were leaving through the front yard, a teenaged boy teased her by tossing her over his
shoulder like she was a sack of potatoes, and she squealed, in fun. The dog
came tearing out of the house, chomped on her leg, dragged her off of the boy’s
shoulder, and bit her on her side. The owner’s boyfriend wrested the dog off of
her, but the dog stood his ground, and either the boyfriend or the police shot
it. Some months later, the homeowner’s insurance company paid the claim, but
first, its attorney took a look at her scars. In the meantime, she had gotten
multiple piercings, but she removed her eyebrow ring before she met the
attorney so she could be properly indignant about getting scarred.
My other dogbite client did
not present herself as an attractive plaintiff because she had been bar-hopping
in Bremerton when the Navy was in port, and she was drunk when she drove home.
A Trooper saw erratic driving and turned on his blue lights, but instead of
stopping immediately, she stopped in front of her house. The Trooper handcuffed
her behind her back and seated her in the back seat of his patrol car, then
took her car keys to the people in her house. While he was busy, she got out of
the car, walked into a neighbor’s back yard, and passed out next to the
foundations of the house. Not seeing her, the Trooper called in the Bremerton
canine unit. Even though the dog handler had been told that she was scantily dressed
(no weapons on her, nor protective clothing) and cuffed behind her back, and
even though a neighbor testified that he could see her motionless, the handler
allowed the dog to drag her away from the house. The bite required 43 stitches
to close, and powerful antibiotics to treat. The canine officer testified that he had seen a
barbeque in the back yard, and was concerned that she might have a barbeque
tool to protect herself, so that using the dog to bring her out was justified
in the interest of officer safety. In short order, the jury agreed.
Such things happen. I did some work for Steve Durkin, a small town Chief of Police, who operated a limousine service on
the side. All of his drivers were
off-duty police officers. One of his drivers, ignoring his own better judgment,
picked up two ladies of the night from the airport. No sooner had they cleared
the airport than they pulled a gun on him, and had him just drive around.
Eventually, he convinced them that he had to stop for gas. When he stopped the
car, he jumped out and ran, and called the King County police. The women jumped
and ran, too, and the County found them with dogs. Before they were arrested,
Steve said, “I think they let the puppy have lunch.”
Within a month after my trial,
Jerry was facing a Judge of the United States District Court for the Western
District of Washington. The Judge was questioning him and other potential
jurors, doing a first cut to rule out those with bias, before turning the
jurors over to the attorneys for further “voir dire.” It was a dog-bite case, with
a plaintiff alleging that a police canine had been used to extract him from his
car. He alleged that the ensuing infection cost him his leg, and that the
excessive force violated his civil rights. Asked about bias, Jerry said “I usually
support the police, but I question some of their policies and some of the tools
they use to carry them out. “ The Judge dismissed him from the panel. As Jerry left
the courtroom, he thought he heard the Judge tell the remaining jurors, “Ignore
what that man said.” The newspaper said that the jury found that case,
justified, too.
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