There was a moment in Courtroom 108 when time ground to a halt, the way only it 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 who 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.”
At the next hearing, the judge transferred Damodaran to mental health court, and that is something of a giveaway.
Mental health court, along with veterans and drug court, is a “problem-solving court” that tries to connect defendants with help rather than punish them.
Is that fair? Damodaran is a single mom with two small children, a boy, and a girl. That raises the question: Can a person be too mentally ill to be responsible for her actions regarding a dog yet capable of caring for two children?
Neither Damodaran nor her attorney would speak on the record. I asked the organizational specialist who helped rescue Betty, Maria Arsenijevich, if she noticed Damodaran’s kids prior to the dog being discovered. She did meet the girl, about 4.
“She was very nicely dressed, she was clean, she came down to speak to her mother, and I was amazed that the transaction between them was very loving. She was normal — happy little toddler, very well spoken,” said Arsenijevich.
More than one reader wrote that the people focusing on animal welfare ought to care about human beings instead. To which I’d respond that a) it isn’t an either/or situation and b) everyone has a right to follow their passion.
While the law goes more softly on animal abuse now, there was a time when it was the other way around. The first anti-cruelty laws protecting animals were passed in New York City in 1867. Seven years later, when a religious missionary wanted to save a 9-year-old girl from being beaten, the police shrugged, since no laws against child cruelty were being violated. So the missionary turned to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, arguing that a child is a sort of honorary animal, almost as good as a horse or a cow or any of the creatures protected under law.
We’ve come a long way since then, in some regards. In others, not so much.