I don’t know for sure without reading transcripts. At a guess it appears this was handled as a contract issue through civil court not a criminal matter. In a civil court a judge can order property seized. In criminal court the judge may be able to require restitution after a guilty verdict. Generally.
Each state is different. In mine and many others the fact that this was handled by a sheriffs office is a big indication that this was handled as a civil matter and not a theft or any other criminal charge. In my state the sheriffs office enforces civil judgement and civil judicial orders while police handle criminal charges and investigations.
Steve Lehto, the attorney with a show on YouTube linked by @Tripolar, speculates that only limited information was given to the judge rather than the full story. He says that he should have been handled as a civil case of a contract dispute rather than as a criminal matter.
The mother is suing the officers themselves, as well as the sheriff’s office and the various other parties involved.
This is the amended complaint and if the complaint accurately reflects the situation, it doesn’t look good for the fairground officials or the LEO.
In the complaint, the mother points out that after the auction, the girl exercised her right as a minor to disaffirm the contract.
From the complaint:
As Steve Lehto explains, minors can’t be held to contracts like adults can be.
It looks like the person who was really out of line was the CEO of the Fair Association. From the story linked above:
The problem is that legally, it’s not her place to do that. Also, the mother went to great lengths to make things right, including getting the winning bidder to agree to not complete the sale as well as the mother reimbursing any other expenses to the association. Legally, there wasn’t a reason for the Association to insist on their actions.
If these are indeed the facts, the Fair Association is not going to be in a good position legally. Lehto said one of his law professors made them all repeat, “Self help is fraught with peril.”
Of course, we are mostly hearing the mother’s story, so other facts may come out.
What do you think the child is going to learn from having the police invade her home, steal her goat, and then kill it?
I guarantee that she learned no lesson about animal husbandry. What she learned (as well as folks following the story) is an important lesson about power - who gets to have it, who gets to wield it, who’s allowed to use violence, and the trivial rationalizations used for it.
That’s the real lesson that the child needed to be taught. You must understand that property rights are supreme above all, and regardless of the pettiness of the matter, the property owner may request the state use any amount of violence to enforce their rights, and the state will energetically oblige.
In either a criminal or civil matter, is a judge allowed to make irrevocable decisions based on information supplied by one side only, without even offering a chance for the accused to respond?
Warrants are often issued to get evidence, yes; but the evidence can generally be returned if the case doesn’t stand up. They didn’t just hold the goat – they killed it.
The actual property owner in this case apparently didn’t want this to happen, but wanted the child’s family to be able to buy back the goat.
One of the problems given in the complaint is that the sheriff’s office made the determination who was the legal owner of the goat and that is a big legal no no. This is one of the reasons the officers themselves are being sued.
It’s not that simple. According to the complaint, the girl decided to back out of the deal and minors can do that. She would have still been the legal owner of the goat.
In either case, the goat was taken and killed by somebody who didn’t own it. (well, arranged to be killed. Again, I have no idea what, if anything, the people at the slaughterhouse knew about what was going on.)
…who the property owner actually was in this case is part of the dispute. The argument is that the girl disaffirmed the contract and was the actual owner of the goat at the time the goat was taken. How that actually plays out will probably be over to the courts.
It seems unlikely that the people at the slaughter house are at fault. People bring them goats to be killed all the time. It’s possible there was a red flag on this goat, but I haven’t seen anyone claim that.
Yes, but both the girl and the politician who thought he’d purchased the goat were okay with the politician being paid back, and the goat going to a place that would have kept the goat alive. So the question of ownership may be less central than the question of standing. What standing did the fair have to direct the police to seize the goat? And what standing did the police have to act on that without verifying the ownership of the goat?
And, even if there was standing to seize the goat as evidence, how did that get turned into standing to destroy said evidence?
– I agree that the slaughterhouse may well not share in the blame; I was just saying that I don’t know whether they were aware of their being a dispute in the case. They may not have been; I’ve helped a farmer deliver livestock to a slaughterhouse and I don’t remember her having to provide any proof of ownership. I doubt the issue comes up often enough for most slaughterhouses to have a policy requiring it.
This is incorrect. The auction winner never owned the goat at any point, nor would they have (the bid was for butchered goat meat, not a live goat).
An auction is a multi-party contract. It’s initiated by seller surrendering their property to the auctioneer. When a high bid is confirmed, this satisifes only an intermediate part of the contract. The high bidder doesn’t become owner until the transaction closes (all parties having executed the sale documents and exchange funds for property).
So although the family still technically owned the goat, they had transferred their rights to the auctioneer, who then held the rights to butcher and sell it. Even though both buyer and seller wanted to abandon the contract, the auctioneer had the right to force them to perform, and they exercised that right.
And this was the real purpose of the debacle - the auctioneer wanted to send the message that they’ll enforce their contracted sales by any means available to them, even if both buyer and seller had second thoughts, even if it involves a heavy-handed law enforcement action. Property rights are supreme.
Thanks for the summary. Does it matter that the family was not paid for the goat yet?
From one of the articles it was not just the state fair, but also the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CFDA) that demanded execution of the contract.
I haven’t seen the agreement that the family entered into, or a summary of it. I’m just going off how I understand auctions normally work.
No, she has no point at all. She’s trying to color this as an abuse of the criminal justice system because the Sherriff’s office got involved. The problem with that theory is that nobody was arrested or charged, so obviously there are no criminal proceedings involved whatsoever. It’s routine for a Sherriff’s office to enforce civil actions (compare this to evicting someone for not paying rent).
The family is at fault for entering a pet goat in an auction where it was explicitly to be slaughtered. They knew what was going to happen. That’s 100% on them, and they had no right to take the goat back.
The fair was within their rights to recover the goat. But they also had the right to return the goat to the child who wanted to call backsies, and then sue for the amount they were due ($63). So again it’s obvious that the point here was for the auctioneer to hammer home the point that their rights trump every possible consideration.
…the complaint states that there are “no such legally enforceable rules which would have precluded Plaintiff’s from terminating in the livestock auction.” And I haven’t seen anyone suggest otherwise. I don’t think “they had no right to take the goat back” is a correct thing to say, considering the circumstances.