Ex-Guard Gets 1 Year For Killing Kittens
Originally published by The Associated Press, March 22, 2002
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — A former prison guard who crushed five kittens in a trash compactor at Sing Sing was sentenced Friday to a year in jail by a judge who said the crime was "so offensive and so calculated and so gratuitously cruel it diminishes the humanity of everybody."
Ronald Hunlock, 48, had been convicted of aggravated cruelty to animals under a 3-year-old statute called "Buster's Law" for a cat that was doused with kerosene and set on fire.
Last March, Hunlock found an inmate with contraband at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining. He then searched the inmate's cell, found five newborn kittens and their mother and ordered the inmate to put them in the compactor.
When the inmate refused, Hunlock did it himself. The mother cat escaped but the kittens were crushed.
"I made a bad decision and I'm sorry," Hunlock told state Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Lange.
Defense attorney Daniel Gallivan asked the judge not to impose jail time, repeating his trial argument that Hunlock thought the cats were ill and had no other recourse. But prosecutor Lynn Rosenthal demanded imprisonment and the judge said killing the cats was cruel "not only to the animals involved but to the inmate."
He said he had received 10 letters calling for leniency and 468 urging the maximum sentence.
He acknowledged Hunlock's 20 years of service in prisons, "not an enviable job," but said the guard had crossed the line between keeping order and inflicting cruelty.
He sentenced Hunlock to one year for killing each of the kittens and one year for trying to kill the mother. He said the terms could be served concurrently.
Gallivan asked that Hunlock be kept in protective custody because he might be known to other inmates and Lange agreed to recommend it.
Several animal rights activists were in Westchester County Court for the sentencing.
Diane Sautner of the animal rescue group Just Strays said the sentence was "too short. I'm happy he got sent to jail but I would have been happier with two years," the maximum.
"It was just a horrific thing and he never expressed remorse," she said. Hunlock had been suspended without pay since he was charged and he officially lost his job upon sentencing.
Gallivan said he was losing as much as half a million dollars in pensions.
Just before the Hunlock case came before him, Lange sentenced another man to five years probation for the same crime.
Michael Johnson, 30, of Peekskill, stabbed his pit bull 30 times last year when it refused to leave with him after he argued with his girlfriend.
Lange said the different sentences were due in part to Johnson's pleading guilty rather than insisting on a trial.
The dog, with 206 stitches, survived and was adopted, as was the cat that escaped the compactor at Sing Sing.
