What the Cold Nose Knows

摘要

Juries love dog testimony. As witnesses go, nothing beats a canine for sincerity and trustworthiness, and nothing brings a little light into a dismal courtroom like the goofy grin and thumping tail of a hound. "The jury eats it up," says police K-9 handler Pat McAlhany, a veteran of the Miami-Dade County Sheriff's Office. "From a prosecutor's standpoint, there's nothing better than my actually bringing my dog into the courtroom for a demonstration." Indeed, the practice of using dogs as "nose witnesses" to finger, as it were, the accused is rapidly growing. A rape case that passed through the Los Angeles court system last year illustrates the procedure. A young woman came into the police department and described a brutal attack. Two men had dragged her from a bus stop in an industrial part of the city into an alleyway, where they sexually assaulted her. Traumatized, she initially did not report the attack. But two days later she found a necklace she thought one of the rapists had ripped from her neck. It lay outside the school where she worked. Did one or both of the attackers live in her neighborhood and know her daily habits? She also spotted a man at a local market who reminded her of one of the attackers. Now terrified, she went to the police.