No matter how bitey it gets, you can't just fling a Chihuahua out a deck door to its death, court rules

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today upheld the one-year jail sentence a Quincy man got after his conviction for animal cruelty in an incident involving his girlfriend's annoying little dog.

The man had sought a new trial in part because he felt the state animal-cruelty law was unconstitutionally vague in how it defines "cruelly," in part because the judge wouldn't let him admit a picture of the bite the dog inflicted on the couple's daughter in the moments before the dog's plummeted to its death.

The 14-year-old, eight-pound dog had once bitten the couple's daughter in the face so badly the girl required stitches. What led to his death several years later, however, was when the dog began barking at their daughter in their kitchen and then bit her again. Having had enough, the man advanced towards the dog, which retreated under a sofa - from where he grabbed the dog and threw him out an open deck door. The dog sailed across the deck and then off the side, falling 12 feet to the ground, where the girlfriend found him:

He looked at her, whimpered, cried, and then expired.

The appeals court ruled the statue is pretty clear and it was pretty obvious that flinging a tiny dog like that was pretty cruel.

Where, as here, the terms of the statute are sufficiently defined so as to alert a pet owner that he or she may not throw a dog on its leash onto a deck with force enough to cause the animal to fall off the deck, twelve feet to its death, we perceive no constitutional infirmity.

The photo wouldn't have made any difference, the court concluded, because the jury knew about the bite - and because the bite mark was so small, it only required a simple Band-aid.