by Judy Frank
posted January 25, 2007
A Marion County Jury convicted 48-year-old Joan Annette Mobley of 38 counts of animal abuse late Thursday night, after deliberating almost three hours.
Two of the convictions were felonies, and the remaining 36 are misdemeanors.
The jury cleared Ms. Mobley of 27 counts.
The convictions came at the end of the eighth day of Ms. Mobley’s trial, which featured graphic testimony and impassioned, sometimes angry legal arguments.
Jurors spent Thursday listening to five final witnesses, hearing attorneys’ closing arguments and paying careful attention to the judge’s instructions before finally being allowed to begin deliberations around 5 p.m. central time.
Assistant District Attorney General David McGovern, during his closing argument, told jurors that the case boils down to the undisputed fact that conditions at the Perry Link Memorial Humane Society shelter were horrendous on June 6, 2005 – and that Joan Annette Mobley was the person in charge of the shelter at that time.
If Ms. Mobley was ill at that time, as she claims, then it her responsibility to find somebody reliable she could count on to care for the animals housed there, the prosecutor said. Instead, she ordered her daughter’s boyfriend – a man who could not even hold onto his job at a local car wash – to take over her responsibilities. And even after receiving repeated reports that he was not doing so, Ms. Mobley did not go to the shelter to check for herself whether the necessary work was being done.
Running an animal shelter is a lot like operating a day care shelter, he said.
“You’ve got to be there . . . And if you can’t be there, you say, ‘Please, can somebody help me? I’m sick in the bed’ . . . And you don’t have to be a radical tree-hugging liberal to believe that.”
But Ms. Mobley’s attorney, Jes Beard, was frankly disdainful of the charges against his client. Just because an animal is present in a shelter that is filthy and reeks of urine and feces – and where other animals have been neglected and/or abused – does not mean that particular animal also was abused, he told the jury.
Until a few days before June 6, 2005, when police raided the shelter after being told it was full of dozens of dead and neglected and/or abused animals, evidence indicates the animals there were being fed and given water, he argued. Otherwise, many more animals would have been dead or dying when they were discovered.
“I’m not trying to suggest for a moment . . . that the animals were properly cared for,” the defense attorney said. “But she was doing pretty poorly at that time, and she relied on (her daughter’s boyfriend) to do the work . . . Some of the animals probably were abused – but not by Joan Mobley.”
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