On August 8, 2015, a group of 24 people (Burnett, et al) from Metro Detroit, Monroe and Jackson, Michigan were indicted in federal court on charges related to drug sales and dog fights conducted between March 2011 and May 2015. Dog fighting is an insidious underground organized crime that has reached epidemic proportions in America. Dog fighters are violent criminals that engage in a whole host of peripheral criminal activities. Many are heavily involved in organized crime, racketeering, drug distribution, or gangs, and they arrange and attend the fights as a forum for gambling and drug trafficking. 

We hereby request that the Honorable Avern Cohn sentence all defendants found guilty of “Transporting Animals for Fighting Ventures” in the case entitled United States v. Burnett, et al., Case No. 2:15-cr-20317-AC-MKM to the maximum penalties allowed under law: 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Criminals convicted of engaging in dog fighting must be sentenced to the maximum penalties allowed by law. Lenient terms of incarceration meted out to the perpetrators of dog fighting crimes is the norm, frequently less than one year in the county jail. Vigorous sentencing for these lawbreakers is necessary to hasten an end to dog fighting as a criminal enterprise, demonstrating to all the perpetrators involved in this unspeakable brutality that the courts are taking the crime of dog fighting very seriously.

Many communities have been morally, socially and culturally scarred for generations by the menacing pestilence of dogfighting. From a very early age, children in those communities are routinely exposed to the unfathomable violence that is integral to the blood sport. Even seasoned law enforcement agents are consistently appalled by the atrocities that they encounter before, during, and after dog fights, yet the children that grow up exposed to it are conditioned to believe that the violence is normal. Those children are systematically desensitized to the suffering and brutality of dog fighting and its inherent cruelty. It’s time to stop the madness. The brutality inherent in dog fighting will no longer be tolerated by American society.