I was in your courtroom on June 30 to hear you pass sentence on Duanying Chen. I am an educated, well-informed citizen, and I pride myself on trying to understand another’s point of view, even when I do not agree with her or him. However, I am so befuddled by your thinking and, no matter how hard I try to figure why you did what you did, it still makes no sense to me in any way.
What Chen did to the puppy was not just the whimsy of youth as you implied when you mentioned that he was “only 19” when he committed the crime. I have heard people relate their one-time childhood experience with harming an animal (shooting a bird with a BB gun, for example). For a normally developing human being, this is done from curiosity, and the experience of causing pain to another creature is so traumatically unpleasant that they never do it again. That is normal. Also, Chen was not a child. At age 19 we are counted as fully grown adults, so the point is moot.
If you stop and think about the injuries to Davey, Chen would have had to restrain and hold it while the helpless animal screamed in pain and fear. This was done for a long time while the puppy tried to escape. Does this seem at all normal to you? What normal person can even contemplate such acts, much less perform them on any living being.