Philadelphia Weekly

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The crime was as rare as it was heinous. A 911 hang-up in February 2002 led police to the home of Craig Miller, a 43-year-old legally blind man who once ran for mayor in his hometown of Lansdale, Montgomery County, some 40 minutes northeast of the city. When they arrived, they found a drunken Miller in the garage trying to revive his injured 5-year-old Seeing Eye dog, Inky.

He frantically told police he was walking home from a nearby bar when the dog just stopped moving, so he dragged the black Labrador retriever the rest of the way home. After a veterinarian checked the dog out, officials learned it had actually died from multiple blunt force trauma and a ruptured spleen.

Confronted with those facts, Miller soon changed his story and admitted he'd actually kicked the dog to death.

Before long the case took on a life of its own. Animal-rights activists and dog lovers from around the world urged the Montgomery County district attorney's office to take no mercy on Miller.

He's a sick man, they said, and he must be punished for killing an animal whose sole purpose in life was to help him, to be his eyes in a world of darkness.

Having moved to Georgia in the wake of a public firestorm surrounding Inky's death--along with the fact that his wife sought a restraining order days later, saying Miller abused her and their 8-year-old son--Miller returned to Pennsylvania last week for his sentencing.

In court, he claimed a litany of personal problems. (For example, he showed up for a February meeting at the county probation office with marijuana after being found guilty of an animal-cruelty misdemeanor.)

Though Miller swore he still lives with unbearable guilt, the judge would hear nothing of it. He sentenced Miller to four to 23 months in the Montgomery County Correctional facility because he "took someone else's sight." He must also get counseling and pay $1,000 to Leader Dogs for the Blind, the Michigan-based organization that's provided more than 12,500 guide dogs since 1939.

Barring any appeals victories, Miller must turn himself in to authorities by June 6.

Neither local nor national animal-rights activists can recall any cases of a blind person savagely beating their guide dog. Not even Patricia Maurer, spokesperson for the National Federation of the Blind, can recall an incident in which someone abused their guide dog.

Perhaps that's because people must often wait months to get a Seeing Eye dog, just like Miller did for Inky. And once they get the dog, they know about $30,000 has been invested to make sure the companion does its job properly.

For those reasons--not to mention the fact that the animals are bred to be undyingly devoted to their masters--Inky's case affected people from all over.

"People were emotionally attached to this case in part because such a horrible thing was done to that dog," says Christopher Mullaney, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Miller. "It was born, bred and trained to be a service dog for him 24 hours a day, seven days a week. By all accounts Inky was completely docile and timid. Not an ounce of anger or meanness in him. This was a needless and horrific crime."

Before the trial, numerous animal-rights groups contacted Mullaney's office to lend their support. Among them was Ann Chynoweth, an attorney with the Humane Society of the United States, the nation's largest animal-protection organization with more than 7 million members nationwide, including 370,000 in Pennsylvania.

"Animal cruelty is a violent crime that threatens community safety wherever it happens. What makes Inky's death all the more disturbing is that he was killed by the man he had devoted his life to," Chynoweth wrote in a pretrial letter to Mullaney. "To think that Inky's devotion was repaid with a savage beating and death is unspeakably cruel. In our experience, the public has a keen interest in seeing animal abusers brought to justice."

Though Miller's attorney, Nino Tinari, can still file an appeal, many interested parties now say they don't think the man's punishment was severe enough.