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U.S. appeals court upholds criminal cockfighting laws

(Reuters) April 20, 2012 - The U.S. Congress did not exceed its constitutional authority when it passed criminal laws that ban cockfighting, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday. After they were convicted of operating cockfighting derbies in Swansea, South Carolina, Scott Lawson, Jeffrey Gilbert and eight others filed two separate appeals in 2010. In both, the defendants argued that Congress' power under the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce did not extend to animal fighting, a distinctly local activity.

But the Richmond, Virginia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit disagreed in both cases, finding that animal fighting has a significant impact on business across state lines. "Animal fighting ventures are inherently commercial enterprises that often involve substantial interstate activity," Judge Barbara Keenan wrote in a unanimous opinion on behalf of the three-judge panel.

The federal animal-fighting ban, first passed in 1976, makes it a crime to sponsor or exhibit an animal in a fight for sport, betting or entertainment. Prosecutors accused the defendants of entering roosters in so-called derbies, a series of fights where the owner of the winning bird takes home a pot made up of participants' entrance fees. ****

Before the fight, a knife is attached to the rooster's leg; the fight ends when one of the birds dies or surrenders. The losing bird is often killed after the match, the court opinion said. The Humane Society of the United States filed briefs in support of the animal fighting ban.

Upholding the ban, the 4th Circuit panel found that cock fighters often transport birds across state and foreign borders, risking the spread of infectious diseases like bird flu. The court cited Congress' 2007 findings that the gamefowl industry, which breeds birds for fights, generated billions of dollars in annual revenue, with a nationwide economic impact.

The panel did overturn the convictions against Lawson and several of his co-defendants, finding that their trial was compromised when a juror conducted his own research into the meaning of "sponsor" - an element of the animal fighting crime. The panel authorized a new trial against those individuals.

Lawyers for the defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment. And the U.S. Attorney's Office did not immediately provide comment. The 4th Circuit appeals are U.S. v. Lawson et al, No. 10-4831; U.S. v. Gilbert, No. 10-4848.

The Last Gaff of the Cockfighting Lobby

February 20, 2014 Michael Markarian: Animals & Politics

Cockfighting has been illegal in Kentucky since 1893. But a group of active cockfighters in the state are still trying to hold onto the last vestiges of this cruel and criminal practice, deservedly on its last gasp. 

As Sam Youngman and Janet Patton reported in the Lexington Herald-Leader yesterday, the cockfighters are upset with U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and others who voted for the Farm Bill, because it includes a provision making it a federal crime to attend or bring a child to an animal fight.  That provision is the latest in a series of measures that fill the gaps in the legal framework focusing on cockfighting, and provide law enforcement officials with the tools needed to crack down on staged animal combat across the country.

With such anemic laws in Kentucky, the cockfighters are pretty brazen in their efforts to defend a practice banned for more than a century.  Incredibly their spokesperson stated, “When you make a law like that you take good taxpaying people and you turn them into criminals overnight. The grassroots on this are not playing games anymore. They’ve been beaten and battered for 30 years. They’re rural people. They want to be left alone.” One might say they are already operating like organized criminals.

This man needs a lesson not just in ethics but in history. It was not too long ago that cockfighting was still legal in a handful of states, with dozens of open-air pits, some of them the size of high-school football stadiums with concession stands, and millions of birds with razor-sharp knives strapped to their legs, forced to hack each other to death for entertainment and gambling. The conventional wisdom among some politicians, in a few states, was that you couldn’t go against the cockfighters, who supposedly had a stronghold of a voting bloc in some rural regions.

But that conventional wisdom was turned on its head when voters overwhelmingly approved statewide ballot measures to ban cockfighting in Arizona and Missouri in 1998 and in Oklahoma in 2002. Not long afterwards, a poll in Louisiana, one of the last cockfighting holdouts, revealed that 82 percent of voters wanted it banned. When animal advocates exposed the pro-cockfighting positions of Chris John, the Democratic candidate for Louisiana’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2004, a large number of Democratic women who couldn’t stomach animal cruelty crossed party lines to vote for the Republican candidate, helping to send David Vitter to the Senate.

Now dogfighting is a felony in all 50 states, cockfighting is banned in all 50 and a felony in 40, and both are felonies under federal law, and there’s a firm social and political consensus on the issue. The latest upgrade to the federal law—to punish the spectators who finance the fights with their admission fees and gambling wagers and provide cover to animal fighters who blend into the crowds during law enforcement raids—passed the U.S. Senate three times before being folded into the final Farm Bill package. In the Senate, where any single lawmaker can slow down or derail a piece of legislation, the animal fighting provision was virtually a non-issue. It was cosponsored by dozens of Republicans and Democrats, and endorsed by the National Sheriffs’ Association and more than 300 individual sheriffs and law enforcement agencies. The only people on the other side? Illegal animal fighters.

There’s still a small and active group of cockfighters out there, but the politicians have left them behind, as society itself has done. Now, they are flocking to the remaining few states with weak misdemeanor penalties where they hope they can get away with a slap on the wrist, while the window is surely closing upon them. Sen. Mitch McConnell and other lawmakers targeted by cockfighters have nothing to fear, squarely on the side of law enforcement and humane treatment as they clearly are, and firmly against organized criminal activity and animal cruelty, as they should be. 

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