Richard Bruce Rosenthal, Esq.

In October 2009, Lexus, a high-prey-drive greyhound, was declared a vicious dog and put on death row. She sat in a Rhode Island kill shelter waiting to be put down. Her crime? Left unleashed in a dog park, she followed her instincts and killed a Pomeranian puppy. (Small, long-haired dogs are perceived by many greyhounds as prey; this is the instinctive response of a sighthound.) The greyhound was seized, her owner attended a hearing without counsel, and the judgment paved the way for her execution.

Luckily for Lexus, Robin Mittasch read her story on the internet forum Greytalk and was moved, together with her husband Rich (an attorney), to fight for her release. Thanks to a quirk in the Rhode Island statute he was able — with the assistance of an attorney in Rhode Island who also volunteered his time — to negotiate the release of Lexus from her cell and her removal from the state. As she jumped into his van, snuggled up, and ate cookies, the idea of The Lexus Project was born.

After 30 years of practice, he found his calling and rediscovered his passion for animal law when confronted with the imminent execution of a greyhound named Lexus for doing what she had been bred for thousands of years to do. After saving her life, he started receiving calls from greyhound rescue groups all over the country asking for his advice and assistance on similar matters. Recognizing the need for this type of resource, The Lexus Project was created.

In 2011, after stepping in to save a Siberian husky facing death in Tolland, CT for killing chickens — a case that drew intense media coverage — he realized that no dog was safe unless all were, and redefined the mission to include defense for all breeds of dogs unjustly imprisoned or facing execution. Civil Rights for Dogs — defining a new paradigm.

The world of animal law is changing rapidly, as is the way the law views companion animals. Dogs today can be protected by orders of protection, they can be the beneficiaries of trusts, be represented by counsel — and more and more courts are beginning to acknowledge the right to emotional damages for harming them.

Unfortunately, dogs occasionally cause injuries to people and other animals, the penalty for which is often death (even when the law says they are innocent). The Lexus Project is a New York not-for-profit corporation existing to help any dog who is facing death or incarceration as a vicious or dangerous dog — defending all breeds of dogs wrongly accused, giving a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves.

America is currently experiencing an epidemic of animal shootings by police officers. No government agency keeps a national database on the number of pets killed by police, but animal-abuse activists have kept statistics, and they say a pet is killed by law enforcement every 98 minutes in America — largely a result of officers having little-to-no training on how to deal with dogs.

Until recently, he had avoided getting involved in the cases of dogs shot by law enforcement, believing they were better addressed by the negligence plaintiff's bar. But the frequency of these shootings has increased so drastically that he could no longer sit on the sidelines. When one ceases viewing these cases as injury-to-property cases and starts dealing with them as civil rights violations, real progress can be made.