The panel of 10 men and two women then deliberated for another hour and 40 minutes to sentence Bradley Glenn Boley to 15 months in prison for putting his puppy in a kennel on a hot stove as punishment.
The dog, named Buddy, suffered burns on 100 percent of his body, a vet testified, and later had to be put to sleep. The case has spawned outrage and disgust among Dallas’ animal lovers, who celebrated the guilty verdict on social media.
Boley, 61, did not visibly react to either verdict, but his loved ones hung their heads when the panel found him guilty.
“They wanted to make him into a monster,” said his brother, Bart Boley. “The best way to describe my brother is an old hippie. … He’s a starving artist, but he’s not what he has been made out to be.”
Boley faced a sentencing range between six months and two years in prison — a reduction from the 10 years he originally faced. The sentence was reduced because the jury did not agree that he used the stove as a “deadly weapon.” Although the Dallas County district attorney’s office originally said he was eligible for probation, that was not the case.
Boley will get credit for time served, which amounts to about a year, according to one defense attorney. He will serve the remaining months for the felony conviction.
In the punishment phase of trial, jurors heard testimony about Boley’s character and criminal past.
Prosecutors introduced evidence that Boley is on probation for a drug offense and also received deferred adjudication for attempted indecency with a child in the 1980s.
But loved ones testified that he is anything but an animal abuser. They said Boley worked at a steakhouse, loved animals and art and regularly prayed for the sick.
A former co-worker said she used to ask Boley to babysit her dogs because she trusted him. “I’ve never met anybody as compassionate as Brad,” said Cynthia Rhodes. “I’ve never seen him get angry.”
Boley’s sister-in-law Roxann Boley testified that Boley suffers from depression. One of his attorneys said that he was on suicide watch before trial “because he didn’t want to be labeled a puppy killer.”
Dallas County prosecutors have sometimes struggled to secure hefty sentences for animal cruelty cases. Experts attribute that to limitations in the law and a split public opinion on how seriously to take animal abuse.
For example, the purported ringleader in the high-profile burning death of Justice the dog in 2012 was sentenced to five years in prison — half of the maximum.
The jury convicted Boley of animal cruelty for putting Buddy in a kennel on top of the stove on Feb. 17, 2014, as punishment for biting. He turned up the heat and ignored the puppy’s frantic cries for help, prosecutors said, until the dog suffered fourth-degree burns that he could not survive.
Jurors didn’t buy the defense’s argument that Buddy’s death was an accident because Boley believed the stove to be broken when he put the puppy in his cage for a time out.
Boley, who did not testify, told police the stove had been broken for about a year and a half, but he speculated that he might have “jarred” it during a cleaning to make it work.
He denied turning on the burner, suggested that it was Buddy who slipped his paw through the cage to turn up the heat and said he did not smell anything burning until a concerned neighbor came by to check on the apartment.
Assistant District Attorney Felicia Kerney, who worked the case with fellow prosecutor Becky Bailey and investigator Steve Wilson, ridiculed Boley’s story during closing arguments Friday.
“Are you telling me this man could not smell plastic and hair and flesh burning? He wants you to believe he heard nothing, he smelled nothing?”
She added: “Really? Buddy reached his paw through the cage and turned the stove on? He should have been making money off of Buddy if he was able to do that.”
Defense attorney Lisa Fox tried to discredit the prosecution’s witnesses during her closing arguments, a strategy she used throughout trial. She accused police of basing their investigation on an unreliable neighbor, who found the dog on the stove and testified through tears this week that Boley showed no emotion and didn’t want to save Buddy.
“I think he thought he was auditioning for an episode of General Hospital the way he was behaving up there,” said Fox, whose team included defense attorneys Jennifer Castillo and Sunil Sundaran.
Fox also questioned why Boley would take Buddy to a clinic if he had wanted him to die and pointed out that the vet who treated Buddy said she “had no indication to assume a malice act.”
“It’s sad when more people are concerned about the accidental death of a dog than the murder of human beings,” Fox said.
(Dallas Morning News - Dec 4, 2015)
Earlier:
- Accused dog killer, Bradley Glenn Boley, 61, weeps in court upon seeing photos of maimed puppy
- If found guilty, Dallas man, Bradley Glenn Boley, 61, accused of cooking puppy unlikely to receive max punishment
- Dallas man, Bradley Glenn Boley, 61, accused of cooking Chihuahua on stove suggests puppy turned up heat
No comments:
Post a Comment