Court dogs provide calm for traumatized witnesses

Published 12:01 am Tuesday, June 14, 2011

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. — A deeply traumatized 15-year-old girl had special help when she took the witness stand Monday at the trial for the man accused of sexually assaulting her for four years.

Rose, an 11-year-old golden retriever whose regular job is helping provide therapy in schools for tro

ubled children, was there at her side, helping calm a child who experts said is otherwise incapable of talking about her ordeal.

It’s an unprecedented arrangement in New York and now gaining acceptance elsewhere. Pioneered by a Seattle prosecutor in 2003, courthouse dogs are now participating in trials in at least 10 states, often over the objections of defense lawyers who worry that the dogs generate extra sympathy for victims and witnesses.

During a little more than an hour on the stand, Rose was mostly invisible Monday. When the girl was asked to point out the man who is charged with raping her for four years starting at the age of 10, the dog poked her muzzle up and the girl stroked it. Then, when she was asked to go into graphic detail about the rapes, she looked down and patted the dog.

In a written decision rejecting a defense argument that Rose’s presence might prejudice the jury, Dutchess County Judge Stephen Greller said he relied in part on an earlier New York case involving a “comfort item,” a teddy bear held by a child witness in an early 1990s sex-crime trial.

Before the girl and jurors were brought in, a handler led Rose to the witness box where she was placed mostly out of view under the supervision of the judge. When jurors returned, Greller introduced the witness and told the panel she was with a companion animal, but they shouldn’t draw any conclusion from that or allow sympathy to sway them.

The girl gave mostly short answers, steadily reaching down with one hand on the lead and one hand on Rose. The jury of seven women and five men gave no indication they even noticed the dog.

Ellen O’Neill-Stephens, a prosecutor in Seattle who founded the organization Courthouse Dogs, has championed dogs helping witnesses. She said they are “an incredible tool” for helping calm victims “reliving the trauma as they’re describing what happened to them.”

Their use gained traction after a 2004 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a defendant’s right to confront an accuser threw into doubt the legality of allowing victims to testify remotely by two-way video or other means to avoid the stressful environment of the courtroom.

“Now you had kids right up there in the face of the person who did this to them,” O’Neill-Stephens said.

“We had an occasion in our courthouse where a child just froze,” she said, describing a witness scared by the presence of a defendant’s relatives. “All it took was playing with the dog to tell the judge he was afraid of them.”

The relatives were ordered out of court.

O’Neill-Stephens lists 18 jurisdictions in Washington, Idaho, California, Texas, Missouri, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Hawaii and New Mexico with courthouse dog programs.