Once a reluctant law student, Jeremy Cohen is now one of the country’s fiercest advocates for canine clients and their owners.
Jeremy Cohen knew the direction his legal career would take when Jesse was sentenced to death.
Jesse was a biter. He had chomped on a woman’s leg in Marblehead and nipped at a couple of smaller dogs. Enough was enough. In 2008, the town’s Select Board declared Jesse a “dangerous dog” who would have to be euthanized. But Jeremy loved Jesse, the German shepherd owned by his fiancée’s ex-husband and their two teenage kids. There must be a way to save him.
He called F. Lee Bailey, the famed defense attorney whom he’d met a few times. “Nothing you can do,” Bailey replied.
Cohen called Steven Wise, the animal rights attorney who later became president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, a nonprofit organization. (Wise died in February this year.) Wise gave him an angle: Because animals don’t have legal rights in such hearings, talk about the owner’s rights. Where was the due process? The right to cross-examine the witnesses, to review all the evidence? It was unconstitutional!
Cohen took the advice. At an appeal hearing, he argued that Jesse and his owner were deprived of due process. The people who ordered euthanasia had never met Jesse, never had an expert evaluate his behavior — how could they sentence him without enough evidence? They had not probed whether something had triggered the bite, or whether Jesse was an inherently dangerous dog, or if he could be trained and restrained to be safer. In the end, the clerk-magistrate agreed: Jesse could live, provided he get training, be kept on a leash, and never set paw in Marblehead again.
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