The owner of four Staffordshire bull terrier-cross dogs that attacked 7-year-old Sakurako Uehara in the Bay of Plenty in early 2014 has been ordered to pay a $7500 emotional-harm payment. He had earlier avoided a conviction in the Rotorua District Court.
Sakurako chan suffered critical injuries from more than 100 bites to her face and all her limbs.
Her plastic surgeon said that she would probably need reconstruction treatment until she reached adulthood. A fundraiser organised by the Middlemore Foundation to support the family throughout her treatment amassed more than $200,000.
New Zealand law allows criminals to be discharged without conviction if they plead and beg enough to the court. This is just plain wrong. I don’t know of any similar system in other countries.
If you break the law, one of the penalties and it’s a very cheap penalty for society to impose, is the stigma of a criminal conviction. Yes, it means the convicted criminal will have trouble travelling internationally and passing police checks were jobs, but that’s the point. New Zealand already has a spent convictions law that allows convictions to be expunged from the record in most cases after seven years of good behaviour.
If the criminal concerned that showed more regard for his fellow humanity and didn’t break the law in the first place, he wouldn’t have these misfortunes which he visited on himself through his offending. Do the crime, do the time and at a minimum, be convicted.
The New Zealand Parliament increase the penalties for owning a dog that causes serious injury from three months to 3 years in 2003 in response to public outrage over a series of savage maulings of children.
Some years later, a dog mauled a 51-year-old woman to death. The owner, who was her nephew, pleaded guilty and received 18 months in prison.
The court said that the starting point for his sentence was 27 months, but this was reduced by the judge to 18 months because he went on television and offered to plead guilty on the day the offence. He regarded his aunt is his second mother. This sentence was one of the few cases I know where the remorse of the offender was truly genuine and he deserved a significant discount on his sentence.
If you own four big strong dogs, and they savage a small child with life scarring injuries, you should expect to go to prison and for a considerable period of time. Strong penalties align incentives properly to make sure that dogs are well trained and any sign of bad behaviour is dealt with early and, if necessary by an early rehousing to doggie heaven.
Nothing like the prospect of a spell in prison to focus the mind of dog owners otherwise blinded by love for their pet.
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