A district judge in Elizabethtown ruled Tuesday that videotaped evidence of alleged animal cruelty at a county farm can be part of an upcoming trial.


Defense attorneys for Esbenshade Farms chief executive H. Glenn Esbenshade and farm manager Jay Musser tried to persuade District Justice Jayne F. Duncan not to allow the footage, which reportedly shows dead hens impaled on wire, heaps of dead birds and inhumane conditions at the Mount Joy operation, one of the state's largest egg-production farms.

Esbenshade and Musser each face 35 counts each of animal cruelty, which carry potential fines of $50 to $750 and up to 90 days in jail per violation.

Attorneys for the defense argued unsuccessfully that an undercover animal-rights activist who shot the footage in December may have violated constitutional search-and-seizure rules by videotaping the premises without permission after lying on an employment application to get a job at the farm.

In December John Brothers showed his videotape to Humane Society police Officer Johnna L. Seeton, who testified to filing the cruelty charges in January based on its content. But she said it was her own decision to charge the farm operators, who oversee an estimated 600,000 laying hens.

Seeton is certified to initiate criminal proceedings in several Pennsylvania counties, including Lancaster. On Tuesday, she denied defense lawyers' suggestion that she worked in conjunction with the Washington, D.C.-based animal rights advocacy group Compassion Over Killing to investigate and file the citations against Esbenshade and Musser.

Brothers testified he is affiliated with COK, saying he worked for the group before and after his employment at Esbenshade Farms but that he sought employment at Esbenshade and videotaped the conditions there on his own. He said he omitted his connection with COK from his employment history on the Esbenshade job application because he wouldn't be hired "... for the same reason the mob wouldn't hire a police officer trying to infiltrate and document conditions."

Defense attorney Chris Patterson hammered at Brothers' credibility while trying to establish a link between COK and Seeton.

Asking Brothers if he provided Seeton with still photographs of the farm, Patterson said, "Can't you remember? Or are you just a habitual liar and you can't remember because you lie all the time?"

Because the district attorney's office does not handle animal cruelty cases, private attorney Christopher P. Lyden is prosecuting on Seeton's behalf.

"The issue today was whether or not the investigation was in any way conducted by the state so that the constitution would be implicated, and it wasn't," Lyden said.

Brothers worked at Esbenshade Farms from Nov. 30 to Dec. 9. He reportedly documented birds being overcrowded in cages to small to allow them to spread their wings, hens living in cages with decomposing carcasses and birds entangled in the wire cages and suffering from illness and injury.

According to its Web site, Compassion Over Killing focuses on agriculture industries and advocates a vegetarian diet as a way to "build a kinder world for all of us, both human and nonhuman."

But defense attorney Michael T. Winters said the animal cruelty statute cannot be enforced against the kind of "normal agricultural operation" his clients operate.

"It's what's the legal standard versus what's somebody else's standards," Winters said. "Other people and other special-interest groups may have other standards they believe should be applied, but we're dealing with the legal standard here."

Duncan did not set a date for the trial's continuation.

The Associated Press contributed to this story. blog comments powered by Disqus