The Reward for Rescuing a Suffering Animal? A $90 Fine

When James Hart and Khalilalim Abusakran saw a deer trapped in a frozen river outside Baltimore, they tried to do the right thing by freeing it – and they succeeded. But when they got to land, police officers with the Maryland Natural Resources Department were waiting for them with citations in hand. The reward for the rescue? Two $90 fines.

“We seen the deer going under,” Abusakran told the local media. “It couldn’t maintain. It was starting to freeze, and it was really getting bad.” So he and Hart decided to go out to it and free it from the ice it was stuck in. “We had oars and shovels to break the ice, for the deer to get out.”

But they didn't have life vests, as police spokesman Sgt. Brian Albert told The Capital. And worse yet, when police allegedly told them to get out of the water, “the men didn't follow instructions,” the paper reports. The horror!

Understandably, officials with the Maryland Natural Resources Police have come under fire; apparently some people – crazy people, no doubt – see something wrong with punishing Good Samaritans for trying to save a life.

"We're coming under scrutiny," Albert conceded in an interview, before laying it on real thick. "But it's easy to pay a fine. It's hard to tell these gentlemen's families that they didn't make it because they were trying to rescue a deer cross the ice."

As Michael J. Smith writes, there are many themes at play in this story that should be familiar to those in the criminal justice reform community. “There's the cops moaning, as usual, about how hard their jobs are, and claiming some kind of smarmy moral high ground on that basis,” he notes. “There's the contempt, masquerading as concern, for the inept public, who would never make it home to their families -- always the 'families'! -- without the oversight and guidance of the gendarmerie. There's the minefield of nanny-state regulations, which enable the cops to bust anybody, for something or other, any time they feel like it. And then of course there's the real reason, rather bare-facedly acknowledged: the two Samaritans 'didn't follow instructions.'”

Hart and Abusakran say they plan on fighting the citations in court. But they shouldn't have to.

Colonel George F. Johnson, head of the Maryland Natural Resources Police, ought to have the tickets – which don't even list an actual offense, just the $90 fine – dismissed. Of course, police and politicians rarely do what's right without public pressure, so why not politely remind Johnson that good Samaritans deserve rewards, not citations.

Photo Credit: Bev Currie