OLYMPIA, Wash. — The Washington Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously confirmed that animal abuse can constitute domestic violence.
The court issued its ruling in the case of Charmarke Abdi-Issa, a Tukwila man who was convicted of animal abuse with a domestic violence designation for savagely beating his girlfriend’s dog, a Chihuahua-dachshund mix named Mona, to death in a Seattle parking lot in 2018.
He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, 12 for animal abuse and an extra six because the attack traumatized a woman who saw him pounding on the yelping dog and booting it into some bushes.
Responding officers took Mona to a veterinary clinic, where the animal died.
The justices unanimously held that the purpose of the domestic violence designation is to enforce existing criminal statutes in a way that ensures victims are protected. It allows courts to issue a post-conviction no-contact order between the perpetrator and the victim.
While the court unanimously agreed that the domestic violence designation was properly applied in Abdi-Issa’s case, two justices, Debra Stephens and Barbara Madsen, disagreed with the majority’s decision to uphold the extra six months he received for traumatizing a witness.
Stephens and Madsen said that aggravating factors must apply only when a crime has a destructive and foreseeable impact on a specific person or group of people besides the victim, not simply because the crime is committed in public and a witness is traumatized.
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