Editorial: Canine comfort can help in the halls of justice

A courthouse can be an intimidating place, even if you aren’t charged with a crime.

Victims of crime can have to relive their worst moments while facing down an attacker. A witness might have to find the strength to participate in the process. Family court cases, such as custody disputes, can be particularly hard to navigate for kids pulled between parents.

And that is why, sometimes, a friend can make it all easier. A warm presence that just helps calm and settle in the midst of a tense situation. But having a person sitting alongside on the witness stand isn’t an option.

That is where a dog can be man’s — or woman’s or child’s — best friend.

The idea of courthouse dogs started in Mississippi more than 20 years ago. Sometimes they are in the background leading up to the hardest moments and sometimes in courtroom itself.

In Pennsylvania, they have been around for at least a decade. Allegheny County Courthouse first became home to a pup named Penny in 2011. Today she’s 13 years old and was nominated for the American Humane Society’s Hero Dog Award this year and has been joined by a second furry friend, Rune. In Westmoreland County, a rotating staff of canine counselors from Westmoreland County Obedience Training Club Thera-Paws have filled that role.

But the Keystone State, like most of the U.S., doesn’t have a codified process for a dog’s presence in court. It is generally left up to the judge on a case-by-case basis or a president judge who sets the protocols for his courthouse.

A recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision officially ruled a “comfort dog” can be present without unfairly prejudicing a jury against a defendant. The decision came in the appeal of convicted murderer Sheron Purnell, whose lawyers argued the witness who testified against him in the 2016 case was afforded unfair sympathy because of a Chester County sheriff’s department dog.

The justices unanimously decided that dogs can have a place in the courtroom, leaving the mechanics of it up to the trial courts but stressing that defendants should be protected from prejudice in the process.

This is a step in the right direction, but the state legislature should take up the ruling as a responsibility to do what only a few other states have done: actually writing the guidelines for what is allowed and what isn’t.

Courtrooms are places where everyone has a job that is clearly spelled out, according to the law. That should apply to a courthouse dog, too.