A few questions about what’s going on with Michael Vick. First, how do we know (or suspect) that Vick personally executed dogs? What evidence is there, or did the other suspect tell that to the prosecutors? Secondly, how do you kill a trained pit bull who’s been trained to attack with your bare hands? Finally, wikipedia claims that Vick will have to “forfeit the Surry County estate to the federal government”. If there was a mortgage on the property, would the government have to pay it?
Witness testimony to the Grand Jury, which was included in the indictment. You can read it here. If Vick were to go to trial, the cooperating witnesses from the indictment would probably be called to testify as to what they saw.
After the indictment, three of Vick’s co-defendants struck plea-bargain deals in exchange for testifying against Vick. That’s when he decided to plead guilty as well.
The dogs were most likely restrained when they were killed. It’s pretty easy to beat a collared, muzzled pit bull to death if it can’t fight back.
Now that’s an interesting question.
Co-defendant testimony:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/08/17/vick/index.html?imw=Y&iref=mpstoryemail
Even senior citizens can:
http://digg.com/offbeat_news/Senior_citizen_kills_attacking_pit_bull_with_bare_hands
From http://www.firstam.com/content.cfm?id=2922 :
In an interesting case of first impression, U.S. v. Harrris, 2001 LEXIS 5549, 2001 FED App. 0096P (6th Cir. April 4, 2001), the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mortgage lenders could collect a prepayment premium as provided in their respective loan agreements where the property subject to their respective mortgages was forfeited to the government, and later sold by the government, as the result of a criminal forfeiture proceeding against the debtor. The mortgagees were innocent third-party lenders, each of whom had a valid first-priority lien against the respective mortgaged properties, which were owned by entities controlled by the debtor. Under the terms of the mortgage lenders’ prepayment-premium provisions, a prepayment consideration became due upon any event of default under the loan documents. The lenders accelerated their respective loans for failure to make the scheduled loan payments, and commenced foreclosure before the government’s seizure of the properties as the result of its criminal forfeiture proceeding against the debtor. The lenders submitted loan payoff figures to the government, including prepayment premiums in the aggregate amount of more than $1,700,000.
How do you restrain an attack dog without it ripping you head off?
These are dogs, not werewolves. They do not spend their entire lives ripping the heads off anything that moves. They fight when they are provoked by a human or another dog.
Those pit bulls have also been trained not to attack human handlers, since doing so would cause them to be disqualified from a fight.
The indictment doesn’t exactly accuse Vick of personally executing a dog. The other defendants are clearly and directly accused of personally executing dogs at various places in the indictment.
As to Vick, there are two pertinent allegations:
Doesn’t sound like Vick participated personally in that execution. We don’t know whether Vick was “consulted” in person or by telephone. We don’t know whether Vick was present. We don’t know whether Vick authorized the execution. We don’t know whether Vick knew what means of execution would be used.
Paragraph 83 comes closer to accusing Vick of personal involvement in executions:
It is not clear from this allegation whether Vick is supposed to have personally killed any dogs. I suspect that if Vick had killed a dog with his own hands, the indictment would have spelled that out. Because it doesn’t, I imagine that the grand jury testimony showed Vick was merely present while the dogs were being killed.
Presumably, Vick at least has some equity in the property (equity being the difference between the market value of the property and the amount of the mortgage). He probably just owns the property outright.
But even if there is a mortgage, the government will just sell the property, use the proceeds to pay off the mortgage, and keep whatever is left over.
My understanding is that the dogs being killed were the losers of fights, and were in pretty bad shape at the time of the executions. Spoke’s post above confirms it.
Also, as Xema points out, these dogs were predisposed to think of Vick and friends as the “pack leaders” and as caretakers, not as prey.
Anyone notice this Google Ad –
!
Weird. The google ads I’m getting are all about anger management.
Oh and then there’s one for Showtime’s Weeds. Which, I guess, is sort of related. (Dude! Mellow out! Here, have a toke, bud!)
According to pit bull websites I’ve visited, it’s generally asserted that pit bulls are as much genetically predisposed to NOT attack humans as they are to attack other dogs. “Human aggression is a very different thing from dog aggression” is how they put it. I’ve seen claims that people who breed commercially valuable pit bulls have to keep other breeds of dogs (the “guard breeds” like German Shepherds, Dobermans, etc.) to guard them – otherwise the pit bulls would be easily picked up by strangers.
I’m told that this is the product of selective breeding so that handlers could reach into a dog fight and separate the dogs without getting bitten.
I don’t know if it’s true. I do know that when our pit and pit-mix had some snapping while sorting out dominance (not a true fight), I was able to reach right in and grab the totally-focused, snarling dogs and separate them without injury.
You can probably google up “human aggression in pit bulls” or something like that.
Pit bulls do bite people – when they’ve been trained to do so (even inadvertently trained…people are dumb).
Sailboat
Makes me wonder whether there’s some GLBT “cure” group that’s advertising with keywords like “electrocution.”
Makes me wonder why people keep using browsers that allow ads onto their screen space.
What, so you’re saying we can turn off the SDMB’s Google Ads?
It was a smarmy way of saying “get Firefox.”
? I have Firefox.
There’s an extension called Adblock that will keep the embedded ads off your screen, when enabled.
No, there are lots of other browsers besides Firefox that also avoid these advertisements.