In an outrageous lack of discretion, some members in the animal control and court system in Havre de Grace, Maryland put 81 year old great grandmother Mary Root through a harrowing ordeal.
Mary Root says her pets somehow got loose from her yard several times. A neighbor took pictures of the dogs running down the street and reported her to Animal Control.
The agency slapped Root with a $7,000 fine or she could spend nearly a year in jail.
“I’m struggling to pay my house taxes. I couldn’t pay it. It’s a different thing when you leave your dogs out and you don’t care. But I do care,” Root said. But when the cancer survivor failed to show up at court on her doctor’s orders, a judge had Root arrested.
UPDATED: The recent case of Ethan Couch, 16, out of Burleson, Texas has been previously addressed on this blog (here and here) in general terms of the fundamental unfairness and apparent bias of the plea deal and in psychological terms concerning both the social isolation wealth can engender and the consequent lack of empathy that creates. Let’s look at this in a little more detail as relates to justice and the corrosive effect such rulings have on social order. The pattern of facts in this case are critical to examining whether or not Couch’s sentence was just and inform whether or not such rulings are corrosive to society as a whole. To summarize:
Hollie Boyles, 52, Shelby Boyles, 21, Brian Jennings, 41, and Breanna Mitchell, 24, are the primary victims.
From left: Brian Jennings, Breanna Mitchell, Hollie Boyles, Shelby Boyles.
Just before midnight on June 15, 2013, Mitchell was driving west on Burleson-Retta Road when she had a blowout, forcing her pickup truck into a roadside ditch. Living nearby, Hollie and Shelby Boyles heard the blowout and went to render assistance. Jennings, a Burleson youth minister, was returning from his son’s high school graduation party when he stopped to assist Mitchell as well. All four were on the roadside when they were struck by a pickup truck driven by Ethan Couch. The Ford F-350 pickup was going between 65 and 70 miles per hour in a 40 mile per hour speed zone when it clipped Mitchell’s stranded truck before striking and killing the four bystanders. Couch’s truck then struck Jenning’s pickup truck (in which two young boys were waiting) sending it back into the roadway. There it collided with an eastbound Volkswagon carrying two Burleson girls before going off the south side of the road. Couch’s truck then flipped over, coming to rest against a tree on the north side of the road. Two other teenagers riding in the bed of Couch’s truck were thrown from the vehicle. One suffered broken bones and internal injuries. The other suffered a traumatic brain injury that left them unable to move or talk.
In an outrageous lack of discretion, some members in the animal control and court system in Havre de Grace, Maryland put 81 year old great grandmother Mary Root through a harrowing ordeal.
