Do you have a new member ready to join our Bar?

Where: FCBA Office

When: Friday, November 11th

Please let us know if you can help. Contact Amelia at 717-267-2032 or director@franklinbar.org

DiLoreto, Cosentino & Bolinger has just celebrated 40 years in practice. Founded in 1982 by Denis DiLoreto and Phil Cosentino, a partner and associate at Black & Davidson, the two member operation moved into the former Civil Defense Room on the third floor of the Chambersburg Trust Company Building. (historical note – most of the furniture for the office was purchased by Judge Meyers’ mom, Helen, at her furniture store, Walterick’s in St. Thomas!) In 1985, President Judge George C. Eppinger retired and joined the firm in an “Of Counsel” capacity. As Phil tells the story, Judge Eppinger’s only employment demand was that his law clerk, Brad Bolinger, be hired by the firm as well. As Brad tells the story, the firm was on the verge of bankruptcy and pleaded with Brad to join the firm to save them from financial ruin.

           After a brief stent at East Washington, the firm moved to its present location at 330 Lincoln Way East in 1993. Tony Cosentino, who had grown around DCB, running around the conference room table in diapers and an Eagles jersey, joined the firm in 2006. Much needed class and sophistication was added when Krystal MacIntyre joined the firm in 2014. Finally, in 2020, Logan Bolinger, another toddler/future attorney who had spent years around the DCB office joined the firm.

           From the earliest years, DCB’s practice areas have been dedication exclusively to civil litigation, representing injured Plaintiffs in civil negligence actions and representing injured workers in workers’ compensation claim. In addition, representing Social Security Disability Claimant’s has been an important and fulfilling area of practice.

           The firm has a long history of participating in the FCBA. Each of the firm’s practicing attorneys continue to be members of the FCBA and PBA. Denis (retired) and Phil are past presidents of the FCBA as well as past recipients of the Edmund C. Wingerd award. Brad served the FCBA in a number of roles including as longtime chair of the Law Day Committee. Tony currently serves as the president of the FCBA, and Krystal and Logan are members of the YLD.

The complete member list is updated quarterly and available to you and your staff two ways.

You may download and print a PDF from the members' section of our website (log in required). Or you may email Amelia at director@franklinbar.org to receive a PDF or excel document anytime.

The prosecution has many witnesses that establish the mother’s guilt. There is no doubt that she slew the boy. Her children’s guilt is less clear. While they were at the scene of the crime and were covered in the victim’s blood, the prosecution fails to produce any evidence that they directly attacked the victim. Neither the mother or her children will testify in their own defense, but her rude and disruptive conduct during the hearing is commented upon by the Court. The defense attorney does what he can to save his clients, especially the children, but he faces an uphill battle. After all the evidence is presented, the Judge deliberates at length, and as is customary for the time, seeks the advice of learned men in the community. After much consultation and reflection, the Court arrives at a verdict. The mother receives the only possible verdict given the weight of the evidence, death by hanging. However, moved by their youth, their mother’s poor example, and the circumstantial nature of the evidence, the children are all acquitted. The mother is taken to the gallows tree and hanged by the community’s official hangman. This could have merely been another grisly chapter in the history of an uneasy and violent period, but what makes this killer, and her children stand out, is that they were all pigs. The unnamed sow was one of many animals tried in secular courts for criminal violations against people.

The owner of the sow, Jehan Bailly, also stood trial along with the sow and her children. He was found not guilty of any charge. He perhaps should have been more vigilant, but it was a reality of medieval life that pigs were allowed to extensively wander while they were being fattened for slaughter. The sow was the bad actor who in the opinion of the Court was a murderer, not her owner. This is why her “rude and disruptive conduct” was noteworthy.  She was expected, like any human defendant, to maintain proper decorum in court. If she had it might have given the Judge hope that she could be redeemed. Instead, she confirmed her willfulness and disrespect for law and order. To a modern audience it seems ludicrous to try animals for violations of human law let alone assign them such moral agency, but few contemporary jurists would have raised similar objections. As we shall see, though, while the reasons and the form of punishment have changed, we have never really stopped punishing animals for their crimes against humans.   

I cannot stress enough that this trial, and the others I will mention, happened, and is well attested in extant sources. Despite what to us may seem a farce, this trial was absolutely serious. The trial was costly and time intensive. It would have been far more efficient and cheaper to summarily execute the animals, if their deaths were the only thing being sought. The accepted forms of criminal trials and common law where scrupulously followed. The pigs were imprisoned in the same jail that would have held humans accused of murder. The same hangman that hanged human criminals carried out the sentence on the sow. If anything, the sow received more due process then was the norm for humans. Attorneys were not customarily provided to the accused but given the difficulty of a pig presenting a defense, an attorney was appointed for her and her children at public expense. To do otherwise would have seemed remarkably unfair and lose all appearance of propriety. Neither the prosecution nor the defense merely went through the motions. The prosecution conducted an extensive investigation, called over a dozen witnesses, and the defense attorney was able to save six of his clients’ lives, through a variety of arguments that persuaded the Court. The fact that the piglets were acquitted indicate that these trials were not merely for show. Nor is this case an anomaly, there were many similar prosecutions in secular and ecclesiastical courts, where it was expected that the same basic forms would be observed with some local variation over time and place. Lawyers for animals aggressively litigated for their clients and sometimes appealed their clients’ convictions. In rare cases those convictions were overturned or pardoned. The effected communities thought these trials were important and acted accordingly.

There is a long historical tradition of punishing animals for crimes against humans. This arguably reaches as far back as Ancient Greece but the more salient tradition for Medieval Europe comes from centuries later. Ecclesiastical courts, which I will not address at length in this article, have been trying animals since at least 824 C.E. but strong evidence would suggest the practice predates that period by centuries (these trials are delightfully weird and deserve their own article at some point). In Western Europe, the oldest extant secular prosecution of an animal was in 1266, although again the evidence would indicate that the practice was present much earlier. That case involved another French pig accused of murdering another small child, which is an unfortunate trend seen throughout such trials. 

Both ecclesiastical and secular courts drew their justification from the Old Testament. Many of the common practices come from scriptural references. A commonly cited passage is Exodus 21:28-29 “If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten. But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible.” While hanging was the most common form of capital punishment, some courts insisted on stoning because of the biblical directive. Similarly, the eating of the meat of condemned animals was rarely allowed despite the hardship this caused, due to the biblical injunction.  It also assigns the guilt to the animal rather than the owner, unless the owner was aware of the dangerous tendencies of his animal and didn’t take reasonable precautions. In such cases, the owner is killed along with the animal, not instead of the animal. Genesis 9:5-6 requires that an animal, which sheds the blood of a man, has its blood shed in recompence. Leviticus 20:15-16 requires the person and animal involved in bestiality to be killed. These are a representative, not exhaustive, list of similar directives. Given the theocratic nature of Medieval and early Renaissance society, these biblical passages proved compelling to most jurists of the day. Medieval lawyers also relied on other biblical passages and the writings of theologians, in the defense of their clients.  

Between the 9^th and 20^th century there is surviving evidence of at least 191 prosecutions of animals in either ecclesiastic or secular courts. It is important to keep in mind that these are only the surviving judicial accounts. Much of the period we are talking about has very little in the way of surviving records. What records do survive are not universally available to researchers and/or evenly researched. This may explain why most cases are in Southern and Eastern France, Switzerland, Northern Italy, and Germany. But examples of secular trials span Europe and are even found in the New World. It is certain that the practice was far more widespread than 191 examples would make it seem. Non-judicial sources often speak of animal trials as though their audience would be familiar with them. The trials reached their height at the end of the Medieval Period and the early years of the Renaissance before gradually becoming less frequent. They were common enough in Tudor England, for example, that Shakespeare references a wolf being executed in his play The Merchant of Venice. 

Clearly these trials are based on a fundamentally different understanding of animals and the world, than what is common today. Animals were seen as moral actors in Medieval society. This makes sense when you consider how much time people spent with animals. The average Medieval peasant is thought to have spent nearly 16 hours a day observing and interacting with animals. The animals would have been ever-present parts of the family and the community, rarely more than a few yards away. In an era where we are removed from most animals that are not pets, it can be hard to imagine that your entirely livelihood and survival may rely on observing and caring for a few animals. People relied on their ability to understand and control their animals. The death of animal could mean the difference between their family starving in the winter. Likewise missing the warnings that an animal is preparing to attack could lead to disastrous injuries. Spending that much time around any animal it is difficult not to anthropomorphize them. Any pet owner who can see the wildly varying personalities of individual animals can perhaps understand assigning moral agency to them. The willful pet that seems to be punishing you for some reason is an obvious example. 

Medieval people lived in a world full of uncertainty but with rigid social orders. Tangible manifestations of order where therefore given great weight. Everyone had their place in the social order, including animals. Animals were supposed to be subordinate to humans. When the social order was upset by an animal doing something like attacking a child, things needed to be set right and the animal put in its place. It was therefore natural to assert control over a willful and transgressive animal. By trying them and punishing them, the authorities were able to publicly restore some social harmony and demonstrate renewed control. These trials would have been very comforting to the community who had suffered such a disturbance.   

Secular trials were generally only used for domesticated animals. These animals were part of day-to-day life and expected to fulfill the role that had been divinely assigned to them. They lived among humans and were expected to learn morals from them. A well behaved and docile animal was thought to have internalized these rules and be moral. An animal that deviated from their defined role was behaving immorally and could end up being prosecuted. There are examples of predators being put on trial, seemingly as an example to other predators, but these are uncommon. The most common charges were murder and assault but theft and destruction of property where not unheard of. Defendants could range from pigs, cattle, horses, donkeys, mules, goats, sheep, dogs, and even bees and more exotic domesticated creatures. Interestingly, pigs, usually sows, represent by far the largest group of defendants in these cases, usually for attacking and/or eating infants and young children. Pigs are smart, powerful, omnivores unlike most livestock, and will opportunistically eat meat. A single pig, not to mention groups of them, can threaten an adult in the right circumstances, giving a child little hope if attacked while alone. Since pigs freely roamed through many parts of the medieval village, they also had more opportunities than other domestic animals to cause harm.

Other prominent examples of animal trials follow a similar pattern to the Savigny sow. In 1386, in the Northern French town of Falaise, another sow was maimed in the head and forelegs prior to being hanged because she “had indulged in the evil propensity of eating infants on the street.” These injuries mirrored those of her victim and followed the “eye for an eye” theory of retributive justice that was common at the time. The sow’s trail and execution followed all the accepted forms for a human criminal trial. It is important to note that the judge assigned evil to the animal’s actions. She was not a dumb beast acting on instinct but a moral actor choosing her wicked path. 

Yet another sow was hanged on March 27, 1567, in Senilis, France for killing a four-month-old girl. The Court noted that the punishment was justified because of the cruelty and ferocity of the attack, thereby assigning moral guilt. In 1379, in Saint-Marchel-le-Jueussey, France, two herds of pigs joined forces to attack the swineherd’s son, killing him. Three sows that actually killed the boy were convicted, but so were the other members of the herd. The Court found that the herd’s aggressive conduct and wild cries indicated approval of the act and they were originally sentenced to death as conspirators. Essentially, the Court thought that it was a lack of opportunity to harm the boy, while the other pigs attacked him, not forbearance that kept the rest of the herd from active participation. On appeal, the co-conspirators were pardoned and returned to their owner. Part of this decision rested on the enormous financial loss that would have resulted were both herds slain, but also on the difference in levels of guilt between them and the actual murderers. The three “guilty” sows were hanged.

 In 1712, in Austria, a dog who repeatedly bit the leg of a municipal council member was tried and sentenced to confinement in an iron cage for a year rather than execution. This was a punishment that was also available to humans. It seems the council member recovered from his wounds, and this may explain the more lenient sentence. In 1395, Sardinia laws were passed that made it legal to try and execute cattle who trespassed and damaged property after a single offense. Donkeys, which were more valuable, received three strikes. Their first conviction cost them an ear, the second their other ear, and a third conviction led to them being confiscated by the crown. Several possibly apocryphal accounts of the British trying and executing a number of different monkeys in the 18^th and 19^th century survive. This includes one that allegedly washed ashore wearing a French Officer’s uniform during the Napoleonic War. According to local tradition, the residents, believing the monkey was a French spy, tried and hanged him. 

A particularly cruel example of animal trials involved convictions for bestiality. The dominate understanding originating from Leviticus was that the animal was a consenting party to any such relationship and therefore warranted punishment. Modern audiences would consider the animal the victim, not a perpetrator, because the animal lacks the capacity to consent to sexual relations. Fewer records exist of these types of cases because courts seem to have made a conscious effort to expunge evidence of such crimes, but a few examples do survive. Contemporary non-judicial sources indicate that these trials were depressingly common. 

In 1642, in Massachusetts, a mare, cow, two goats, some sheep, two calves, and a turkey were all executed along with a man by the name of Thomas Granger after being convicted of “buggery.” They were slaughtered in front of him and disposed of in a pit, so no one could make use of their bodies before Granger was hanged. The Court had decided that the animals were willing participants in the crime and therefore needed to be punished. Twenty years later, on June 6, 1662, in New Haven, Connecticut, a man was executed along with three cows, three sheep, and two sows, “withal of which he had committed his brutalities.”   

Not all animals were condemned along with the perpetrators. In 1750, in Vanvres, France, a female donkey was found not guilty of bestiality while her owner was burned at the stake for assaulting her.  Her defense attorney was able to obtain a letter, signed by the prior of the local convent and other town notables, stating that she was “in word and deed and in all her habits of life a most honest creature.” The letter told the court that the donkey was well behaved, virtuous, and never involved in any scandal. She followed the rules of acceptable conduct and therefore was a moral creature worthy of mercy. The support of her community convinced the Court that she was a victim of her owner’s crime and would never have participated of her own free will. This saved her from being burned at the stake and she was returned to the village. 

In 1924 no less than the Governor of Pennsylvania, Gilford Pinochet, led the prosecution of Pep, a Labrador retriever who had killed his wife’s cat. Pep was not given counsel and was found guilty of murdering the cat in a trial presided over by Pinochet personally. Pinochet then sentenced Pep to life in prison at the Philadelphia State Penitentiary. Pep died in prison six years later. Medieval jurists would have been horrified at the lack of due process shown Pep. Also, in 1924 in Indiana, a chimpanzee was tried, convicted, and fined five dollars for publicly smoking, which was apparently illegal at the time. The chimp was part of a traveling show and was facing jail because it had no way to pay the fine. Luckily, the show’s owner paid the fine to avoid losing one of his attractions. Medieval jurists would have been very confused about pretty much every aspect of this case. In 1927, in Connecticut, a dog was tried and incarcerated for attacking a neighbor’s cat. More recently in 2004, in Kazakhstan, Katya the Bear, was tried and convicted of attacking two people in separate incidents. The bear was sent to a human prison colony for fifteen years and was incarcerated with the inmates. After her sentence was finished, she was released to a zoo, which seems to be merely a nicer prison. These cases represent rare incidences where animals actually received some semblance of due process but are far from exhaustive. Few animals receive due process in the modern world.

Modern societies haven’t stopped killing and punishing animals for attacking humans, they have simply changed the expectations. If an animal attacks a human, the animal is often immediately killed at the scene, whether by law enforcement, their owner, or onlookers. If they survive beyond that point, they are often quietly euthanized. This would have upset our Medieval jurists since extrajudicial killings were frowned upon unless absolutely necessary to save life. Punishment was to be applied by the courts, after proper procedure in a public manner, to reassert order. Simply killing the animal had few if any societal benefits and in fact incurred many costs. In 1576, in Schweinfurt, Germany, when a hangman hanged a sow before a trial, he was permanently banished, which was nearly as harsh a punishment as death during the period. He was permitted by the city to kill but only on their warrant. The sow was an accused, but not a convicted, criminal. He had committed a great crime by killing her until she was proven guilty. 

 And make no mistake, we still put animals on trial, we just generally don’t care about their rights. At least thirty-nine US states have vicious dog ordinances. Many of those ordinances allow for the execution of the dog if certain conditions are met. The key difference is that in modern America it is the dog’s owner that has the right to challenge the decision because the dog is their property. A medieval animal on the other hand would have been the one able to assert its own rights through counsel. The dogs are often effectively tried, for either their life or other punishments, that may effectively be incarceration. These laws are justified by the concept of protecting society from animals who have shown vicious tendencies. They offer little else of value because there is no deterrent effect to their owners and unlike Medieval jurists, we do not believe it will deter other animals. There are numerous examples of dogs being executed under these statutes. Many follow lengthy court proceedings were the owners challenge the need to euthanize the animal.  Similar laws exist for exotic animals that society considers inherently dangerous. 

Animal trials provide a modern audience with insight into how our forebears understood the world. In many ways they were more humane and protective of the animals they prosecuted than we are today. The animals were seen as more than merely property but also as quasi members of the community. This gave them more rights but also placed higher expectations upon them. They were also treated significantly more brutally if convicted. Theirs was a violent age where retribution and punishment were seen as a necessary public good. Convicted animals, like people, could face shockingly awful punishments without raising the ire of their contemporaries. Disruption of the social order was an attack on the community and justified nearly any level of brutality to correct the transgression and deter future criminality.  Our society differs from theirs as to be nearly unrecognizable, but we still punish animals for harming humans. All that has changed is the process and the rationale. It may be wise to reflect on the merits of each option, as our justice system continues to evolve toward what we hope is fairer and more just world.