In Ross v. U.S., decided last month by the D.C. Court of Appeals, defendant had left her dog Cinnamon for over an hour in a parked car on a hot day (98 F) with the windows cracked open. (There was some dispute about whether the car was parked in the shade.) She was convicted of animal cruelty, but the court reversed; here's a short excerpt from the long opinion by Judge Vijay Shanker, joined by Judge John Howard:
We note at the outset that the evidence presented at trial does not establish two critical facts: (1) the actual temperature inside the car and (2) the presence of symptoms of heat-related distress in Cinnamon.
The government does not contend on appeal that it proved either of the above two facts. Instead, it suggests that it could rely on the factfinder to infer those facts by applying its common sense to other evidence in the record. According to the government, it was enough for it to prove only that (1) the temperature outside of the car was approximately ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit and (2) Cinnamon would have (had she not been released) remained within the car for approximately one hour and twenty minutes.
We disagree. To be sure, a factfinder may, as a general matter, use their common sense and everyday experience to draw "reasonable inferences from the evidence presented in a trial." But where these "common sense" inferences are grounded in the assumed nonexistence of mitigating facts, they will often "cross[ ] the line … into the prohibited territory of surmise and conjecture." Reasonable inferences must be drawn from, and common sense applied with respect to, evidence; inferences and common sense cannot serve as substitutes for evidence….
Where Cinnamon is concerned, a reasonable factfinder would have found that mitigating circumstances could have reasonably been in play. We reach this conclusion for two reasons: (1) the specific conditions in which Cinnamon was found suggest that the temperature within the car may have been cooler than the unshaded surrounding area and (2) testimony established that Cinnamon manifested no symptoms of heat-related distress despite spending approximately forty minutes inside the car before she was let out.
Judge Joshua Deahl, however, dissented; and the most interesting part, to me, of the dissent was its reliance on ChatGPT; an excerpt:
