Two “specially trained service dogs — Jeeter, a moonlighter, and Ellie, a full-timer,” who work in Seattle’s King County Courthouse or Juvenile Detention Center, have “helped scores of victimized children talk with prosecutors, interviewers and investigators about what had happened to them.” More below:
From “Dogs lend comfort to kids in court,” The Seattle Times, May 14:
“It’s hard to explain,” said the twins’ mother. “He just had a tenderness about him that helped them find the strength they needed to tell the story they couldn’t.
“While we were waiting in the hall to testify, he approached the girls and places his head on their laps. He knew they needed him then.”
Page Ulrey, a Special Assault Unit prosecutor who gives Ellie a home and is one of her co-handlers at work, said, “Ellie and Jeeter are really just about unconditional love.”
Ellie’s duties include nuzzling, cuddling, doing tricks, looking kind and lovingly placing her head on the laps of little ones.
“It can be very, very hard to come in here and talk about what happened,” said Christine Liebsack, the child interviewer with the prosecutor’s Special Assault Unit who uses the dogs most in her work.
“There are definitely kids who do not want to be here, and the dogs can help to break the ice or minimize the trauma,” Liebsack said. “It makes me feel good when I can tell Ellie’s providing some emotional comfort for them that I can’t.”
The program started nearly two years ago when Ellen O’Neill-Stephens, a deputy prosecutor, brought her son’s service dog to the Juvenile Detention Center and the Drug Court where she was working.
Jeeter, who, like Ellie, is a Labrador-retriever mix trained by Canine Companions for Independence, was such a natural at befriending the young and the troubled that word of his abilities spread.
Last fall, a prosecutor asked for Jeeter’s help with the 8-year-old twins who were hesitant to testify in a sex-abuse case, and the success of that story led O’Neill-Stephens to lobby for the dog’s formal placement with the Prosecutor’s Office to help victims. …
My daughter says her pal Riley — the office dog who lives with the owners — would be great with the kids unless they had food with them. Then he’d forget all about the kids.
awww, I want a comfort puppy too!
what a great story. sounds like just the kind of thing republicans would cut out of a budget.
Thank you so much for calling our attention to this. I often work with troubled teens adn young adults in my law practice, many times in helping such kids work with authorities.
I am glad there are prosecutors like Ellen O’Neill-Stephens who will go to bat for these kids in such a way.
And I want a dog too.
They make great companions in the office!
It would be very interesting to hear about your practice, Othniel, if you can without breaking confidences.
Thanks for your interest. I represented many young people in cases involving lengthy stays (one exceeding 1000 days) in private psychiatric facilities during the late 80’s and early 90’s. Many of these kids were physically abused by being place in physical restraints, including one who was restrained for over 200 days in a full body netting to point where hes legs atrophied and he could not walk when ultimately released. Ultimately my clients claims were resolved for an aggregate amount exceeding 20 million dollars.
Much of what we did in our litigation was covered in the national and Texas (most of our litigation involved a facility in Dallas) press at the time, including an op-ed piece written by one of my clients entitled “You’re Sane Now” which was published in the New York Times on October 13, 1993. A follow up story on the Times law page entitled “10 Texas Psychiatrists Sue Ex-Patients Over Fraud Accusations” chronicled our post-settlement litigation and was written by Holcomb B. Noble, published February 24, 1995. The Los Angeles Times, Business Week, ABC, Current Affair, Dallas Morning News, and others also followed the story. I admit it was a blast being on A Current Affair with two of my clients, but I preferred the NYT stories myself.
The Times database abstract for “You’re Sane Now” reads “DALLAS I was one of hundreds of teenagers put in United States psychiatric hospitals in the mid-80’s for such “unusual” behavior as arguing with parents or having trouble in school. Most of us were diagnosed, by nonphysicians, as suffering from serious depression.”
I accompanied the young man who had been in the body net to Washington and represented him in testimony before a sub-committee chaired by then-Representative Schumer. It was as a result of that testimony that I was sued along with two of my clients. The litigation took years to resolve (They finally dropped it) and left me somewhat exhausted.
We did have one of our cases before the US Supreme Court, Rotella v. Wood, 528 US 549 (2000) in which I was counsel on the briefs, having been trial counsel and appellate counsel arguing the case in the Fifth Circuit. We lost 9-0 on a case in which we had been asking for a liberal rule on the Statute of Limitations for Civil RICO (racketeering) cases – Congress had forgotten to put one in the RICO statute and it was up to the Court to supply one, and they took a more conservative approach than we would have liked. If you want you can view Justice Souter’s opinion in that case at http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-896.ZO.html
I moved to Austin and set up private practice soon after the US Supreme Court case, and still do mental health advocacy legal work, as well as criminal defense, some representation of minors in the CPS system, and work cooperatively with LGRL, the Texas Gay Rights lobby. I also am a cooperating attorney in the Lambda and Americans United for Separation of Church and State networks. I live in Austin with my 17 year old son who is a college freshman here.
That may be more than you wanted to know, but I am glad to “come out” about my career.
That’s a tremendous job! I need one of those AND a puppy! Being an actuary is lame. I hardly ever help anyone work-wise. =(
I have found actuaries to be very helpful in calculating damages and suggesting areas of economic impact I might have looked. We all do important work, Abbott.
Same drill as Othniel- they provided pro-bono support to otherwise non-viable “social justice” type actions by coming up with very cool theories for damages.
I bet your local Legal Services clinic would kiss your feet if you gave them a call. Plus any ol’ tort lawyer could provide you with nice side income.
Thank you so much for all you’ve done. You’ve accomplished more in a couple decades than 10s of people do in their entire lifetimes.
Do you happen to know how the young men you helped are doing these days?
The kids still keep up with me some, especially the guy who wrote the op-ed piece, the guy I took to DC, and the young woman who was the focus of the Current Affair piece. Sadly, three of the group are now deceased, and I regularly miss them. For the most part the kids have been able to move on with their lives, though they still bear the scars of their confinements.
Great article in Aug 04 smithsonian mag. @ prison inmates raising puppies to be guide dogs for the blind. Very positive results achieved by giving them responsibiliy for the care, well being and socialization of puppies…it works both ways.
smithsonianmag.com Sorry, haven’t figured out this link thing yet.
dog is god spelled backwards…love ’em.
What if we spent all the money we’re spending on Iraq to buy food, houses and DOGS for everybody who’s poor and homeless!
We’d ALL be better off! As an aside, some of the best socialized, most loyal dogs I have ever encountered are companions to the homeless. They treat their animals with the utmost respect and share everything with them. I suspect because they know what it’s like to be the bottom rung on the ladder.
Dogs are the perfect comfort animal. I love the cats but when I’m in tears, my dog is the one who lets me hug him, stays by me and looks at me as though he understood. Okay, he probably is just hoping for a treat but still, he’s a real comfort. I couldn’t deal with life as we know it without him. He’s big enough to hug too, he’s wolfhound/ standard poodle mix. And I’m obviously a bit fond of him.
If you want a real treat, watch Animal Planet tonight at 8PM PDT. We just watched the first airing — it repeats at 8PM, then once more tomorrow. It’s the Genesis Awards sponsored by HSUS.
They showed a dog rescued by a U.S. soldier in Iraq, and brought the dog on stage. Benji was on too! Lots of good videos and speeches… ABC News won about three awards. HBO Sports/Bryant Gumbel won an award.
It was held last month so they edited it so it runs very tightly, smoothly…. something the Oscars should try!
A friend and I discussing some occasional freak outs of another friend due to Vietnam experiences…her husband also saw a lot of vicious horrors there, yet “does not feel the need to talk about it”. I asked her to find out why. When she got back to me, she said her hub had stated…”Well, Rocky (his dog) knows all about it.”
There’s a small organization called Military Mascots that is working to support our troops in Iraq too.