Michael Reeves was awarded $1,260,000.00 by a jury in Anne Arundel County after his dog was shot by a police officer. The jury awarded Reeves $1,250,000.00 in economic and non-economic damages (click here for the difference between the two types of damages) for gross negligence on the part of the police and $10,000.00 in economic damages for the death of the dog.
Judge Mark Crooks in Anne Arundel County reduced the judgment to $207,500.00. Under the Local Government Tort Claims Act, the maximum recovery for negligence is $200,000.00. Furthermore, under Maryland law, the maximum economic damages you can recover for the injury of a pet is $7,500.00.
Reeves testified that he paid $3,000.00 for his Chesapeake Bay Retriever and Anne Arundel County argued that a verdict of $1,260,000.00 for the death of a $3,000.00 dog was “unconscionable.”
This case is one of the first in Maryland to make headlines since the 2010 case involving Roger and Sandra Jenkins. In the Jenkins case, police officers shot a chocolate lab owned by the Jenkins family. They were awarded more than $200,000.00 for the shooting of their dog and the police department appealed, citing to Maryland’s law that damages to a pet are capped at $7,500.00. Interestingly, the Court of Special Appeals (Maryland’s second highest appeals court) held in Jenkins that the $7,500.00 limitation only applied to the economic damages (out of pocket expenses) that a plaintiff could receive for the value of their pet, but did not limit other types of compensation they could receive, like non-economic damages for their emotional distress.
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