Legal Commentary

Marjorie Knoller, owner of the dog that mauled Diane Whipple to death several years ago, has been sentenced by the Superior Court to 15 years to life imprisonment for murder.  Thus ends (for now, until the appeal) a painful legal saga that has generated a lot of interest in the Bay Area and beyond.

For those who are not familiar with the case, Knoller and her partner, Robert Noel, owned two Presa Canarios. The dogs were obtained through prisoners who were closely associated with Knoller and Noel, and were trained as combat dogs. There had been numerous instances in which the dogs threatened the neighbors, including Whipple, who lived across the hall from Knoller and Noel. Then, one day, Knoller took one of the dogs, Bane, out; as they returned home, and were about to enter the apartment, the dog bolted and attacked Whipple, mauling her to death.

Following the event, Bane, and later the other dog, Hera, were put to death. Their owners were prosecuted for their part in the occurrences. And this is where things became interesting, mens rea wise.

Knoller was indicted for both second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.  The jury found her guilty of both, but the conviction for murder was overturned by the San Francisco Superior Court, rationalizing that it could not "say, as a matter of law, that her [Knoller's] conduct was such that she subjectively knew on Jan. 26 that a human being was likely to die."

While Knoller was serving her sentence for manslaughter, the battle for mens rea continued in a series of appeals. Eventually, today, the Superior Court reinstated the original jury verdict, following the CA Supreme Court ruling that, for a murder conviction, it is enough to act with "conscious disregard of the danger to human life".   

Trying to disengage for a minute from the Knoller facts, I ask myself whether the analytical distinction we make between objective and subjective knowledge is always clear-cut. Being in the position of making decisions after the fact, it is hard to tell sometimes whether a person knew her actions could result in death, or whether a reasonable person would have known that. Lacking a reliable subjective measure of what the specific person thought, we often infer using objective methods. Granted, in the Knoller case the prosecution provided evidence, in the form of letters, as to the couple's awareness of the dangerous nature of the dogs; but aren't we making it easy for ourselves to infer such awareness when we know the end result?

I find myself generally agreeing with the verdict, probably because Israeli law, until the mid-1990s, tended to sometimes regard gross negligence as actual knowledge for purposes of mens rea distinctions, and having gone to law school before the change, the old rule still makes more intuitive sense than the new one. It make sense precisely because the distinction between the subjective and objective standards often turns out, in practice, to be a theoretical one. Nevertheless, doing some soul-searching this evening, I ask myself if the particularly horrifying event, or the particularly unsympathetic defendants, are impacting my judgment. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.