
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 20, 1994                   TAG: 9404200076
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: EXTRA-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

COLLARING CRIMINAL CATS

I don't know what's wrong with me. I try to forget about the new Roanoke County cat law, but I think about it just the same.

What a law. It says officers have to catch a cat debasing a flower garden before it can be arrested.

The trouble is the county doesn't have enough officers to do flower garden stakeouts, so they will set traps for cats, collect them after the fact, and take them to the animal shelter.

This procedure, of course, will be overturned in the courts because it is capricious, arbitrary and flies in the face of and does violence to the nation's constitutional guarantee of due process of law. It also raises the chilling question of entrapment.

So, we will find Sgt. Tuesday and his partner Herman staking out Mrs. Jones' flower garden:

"I hate these stakeouts, Tuesday," Herman says. "You know. You wait all night and catch some cat in the act and then you take it downtown and some judge lets it go on lack of probable cause or something like that."

"That's the way it works, partner," Tuesday says. "I remember the time we were working the day watch out of Vinton and booked the old lady and her husband for having eight cats - six of them fertile."

"Yeah," Herman says, "and they beat the rap by convincing the judge they were in agriculture because she had six Early Girl tomato plants in the backyard and the old man had a riding mower. It makes you sick, Tuesday. It's like living in a sewer."

A large tomcat comes out of the hedge across the street and stops in the light of a street lamp. The cats looks around stealthily and then starts sauntering toward Mrs. Jones' flower garden.

"It's coming down, Tuesday," Herman says. "We've got us a clean collar this time. We got him dead to rights."

"Yeah," Tuesday says. "It's his rights we gotta worry about or we'll be dead. We bust him now and they'd laugh us out of the courthouse. I don't make the rules, Herman. I just enforce 'em."

The cat approaches the flower garden but suddenly takes off down the street.

"That's him, you cretins," shouts Mrs. Jones, who has staked out her own flower garden. "You let him get away,"

"That's right, ma'am," Tuesday says. "You scared him away. Nothing good ever happens, ma'am, when you try to take the law into your own hands."

by CNB