• December 13, 1993
• Vol. 40
• No. 24

Ready for a Milk-Bone Last Meal?

The Owners of Taro, a Dog on Jersey's Death Row, Appeal to the Courts for Amnesty

FOR NEARLY THREE YEARS, HE HAS paced his 6-by-10-foot cell at the Bergen County, N.J., jail, slept on its concrete floor and waited patiently for his twice-daily trips to the exercise yard. Sure, it's a dog's life, but Prisoner 914095—known as Taro to everyone but the legal system—can take comfort from the fact that he has any kind of life at all. The 110-pound Akita is waiting out his appeals on death row. Accused of biting Brie Halfond, the then 10-year-old niece of his owners, Sandra and Lonnie Lehrer of Haworth, N.J., on Christmas Day 1990, Taro, now 5, was declared vicious by a panel of experts and, under a 1989 New Jersey law, sentenced to death.

But publicity has turned Taro's case into an international cause célèbre. On Oct. 14, animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot sent an impassioned letter to New Jersey governor Jim Florio pleading for a pardon. A Kenyan businessman started a fund to save Taro, and a Japanese group—the Akita is a Japanese breed—has expressed interest in the case. Even the dog's jailers are coming to his defense. "Taro doesn't give us the same hassles that the [human] inmates do," says Peter Sparta, who is one of Taro's keepers at the Bergen County Jail. "You can't help but become attached to the guy."

"To put an animal down for something he didn't do is not right," says Lonnie Lehrer, 46, an entrepreneur. He and wife Sandra, 46, admit that Taro had previously attacked three neighborhood dogs, killing one, but say he only scratched Brie, and that the child was teasing the dog. After losing one appeal, the Lehrers—who say even Brie doesn't want Taro put down—have now taken the case to the New Jersey supreme court.

Whatever happens, administrative and legal fees have already cost the Borough of Haworth more than $50,000 and the Lehrers more than $25,000. "Sure it's a lot financially, but you have to look at yourself in the mirror every day," says Lonnie. "We are doing the right thing."