New York (USA) Court Case: Nonhuman Rights Project v. Lavery

Summary

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed two petitions for habeas corpus on behalf of chimpanzees Tommy and Kiko, asking the court to declare them legal entities with rights. The adult chimpanzees, according to the habeas petition, have been confined by their owners to small cages in a warehouse and a cement storefront in a crowded residential area. The case eventually went before the New York Supreme Court, where the Nonhuman Rights Project argued that chimpanzees Tommy and Kiko should have legal personhood and are entitled to protection due to their intellect and capabilities.

The lower courts determined that habeas corpus is unavailable to the chimpanzees, citing dictionary definitions and US case law, which specifies the correlative rights and duties that are attached to legal personhood. While the habeas corpus statute does not define “person,” Black’s Law Dictionary defines the term “person” as “[a] human being” or, as relevant here, “[a]n entity (such as a corporation) that is recognized by law as having the rights and duties [of] a human being” (emphasis added). Associations of human beings, such as corporations and municipal entities, may be considered legal persons, because they too bear legal duties in exchange for their legal rights.

The Appellate Court then reasoned that chimpanzees are not persons because “[U]nlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions. In our view, it is this incapability to bear any legal responsibilities and societal duties that renders it inappropriate to confer upon chimpanzees the legal rights — such as the fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus — that have been afforded to human beings” (id. at 152). No precedent exists, under New York law, or English common law, for a finding that a chimpanzee could be considered a “person” and entitled to habeas relief. In fact, habeas relief has never been found applicable to any animal in the USA.

Petitioner and law professors Laurence H. Tribe, Justin Marceau, and Samuel Wiseman questioned this assumption, arguing that even if nonhuman animals cannot bear duties, the same is true of human infants or incapacitated human adults, yet no one would find it improper to seek a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of one’s infant child or a parent suffering from dementia. “The ability to acknowledge a legal duty or legal responsibility should not be determinative of entitlement to habeas relief, since, for example, infants cannot comprehend that they owe duties or responsibilities and a comatose person lacks sentience, yet both have legal rights.”

However, the petitioner’s effort was repeatedly denied and rejected because their person-like characteristics did not render them “persons” and the petitions were successive habeas proceedings which were not warranted or supported by any changed circumstances, the court said. The Supreme Court of New York declined to reverse the lower court’s judgment that declined to extend habeas corpus relief to the chimpanzees, Tommy and Kiko.

Denial of the habeas proceedings is not a decision on the merits of petitioner’s claims. Eventually, the question will have to be addressed: can a non-human animal be entitled to release from confinement through the writ of habeas corpus? Should such a being be treated as a person, or as property or in essence a thing?

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