Dogs waiting for their owners' court dates are stuck in shelters, unable to find loving homes.
DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Animal lovers are outraged in Georgia and say the court system is to blame. Hundreds of dogs are being held for months in animal cruelty cases, stuck in the shelter and barred from finding a loving family while their owners face charges.
Advocates are specifically pointing to DeKalb County, where they say the problem is at its peak.
There's a group working to raise more awareness: Advocates for DeKalb Animals. The group said there's an easy solution other than keeping animals from finding a forever home.
Take Leo, for instance. It should be illegal to be this cute, but Leo is no criminal. He didn't do anything wrong – but Leo spent most of his life locked up.
“It's just tragic; the way the dogs are forgotten about, the way they have to suffer because the court system is just so completely inept,” said attorney and animal advocate Hadley Recor.
She said Leo is evidence.
The dog has been held at the DeKalb County shelter for months while his former owner faced charges of neglect in DeKalb County Magistrate Court. In Georgia, animals are considered property.
“The bottom line is that they're not doing their job. They don't care. They just don't care,” Recor said about the court system that is supposed to protect the dogs.
Accountability comes through a number of different offices in DeKalb County:
“The county is in a constant state of just passing the buck. That's not my problem,” Markie Campbell, a shelter volunteer, said. “Nobody feels any responsibility to these dogs.”
When people are charged with a crime against their pets, those animals go to the county shelter until the court case is heard. The charges range from neglect, to dog fighting, to puppy mills.
As the case moves through the justice system, the animals cannot be adopted and can wait for months even over a year, in the overcrowded shelter.
Animal advocates say the sheer number of animals waiting for court cases in Dekalb County is not normal.
“It is not this way in Fulton, it is not this way in Gwinnett,” Recor said. “This is a Dekalb County problem.”
Records show Cobb County currently has zero dogs held as evidence for court cases. Clayton County said it has just two dogs in its shelter that are waiting on a court date. Gwinnett County has 14 dogs held as live evidence, and Fulton County has 21 dogs in court cases in the shelter.
Compare that to Dekalb County, where an average of 80 dogs have been waiting on a court case through 2023 – and that number has been as high as 120.
“As a taxpayer, I'm like, ‘What are you doing?'” said shelter volunteer Andrea Seidl.
She said it costs taxpayers nearly $13,000 a year to care for just one animal while it awaits its owner’s court date. With an average of 80 animals in the DeKalb County shelter due to a court case, that's more than $1 million a year.
In Dekalb County, not all cases are treated the same. The district attorney prosecutes felony animal abuse and the solicitor general prosecutes misdemeanors.
Solicitor General Public Relations Manager Donald Hannah said the county attorney then has to sign off for the dogs to be released.
“The process itself and what it takes to ethically and legally move these cases along isn't being considered in some situations,” he said.
Hannah said the office handles more than 110,000 overall cases a year, including traffic citations and other misdemeanors. He said all of those cases are moving through the court system.
11Alive was in court the day six crimes against animals were heard, and three of the dogs were surrendered.
“Our numbers are moving, our numbers are decreasing, our numbers are moving significantly,” Hannah said. “And unfortunately, it's not at the pace where the advocates would like to see that happen, but the cases are moving along.”
From a record high of 125 animals waiting on a court case, the numbers in Dekalb County are going down but animal advocates say for the animals still waiting, it's not happening fast enough.
“It's bad. It's really, really bad. It's a cross between ineptitude and they just don't care,” said Recor.
