Death Of Diane Whipple - Dog Bite Lawyer

Diane Alexis Whipple (January 21, 1968 â€" January 26, 2001) was a lacrosse player and college coach. She was killed in a dog attack in San Francisco on January 26, 2001. The dogs involved were two Presa Canarios: a male named Bane and a female named Hera. Paul Schneider, the dogs' owner, is a high-ranking member of the Aryan Brotherhood and is serving a life sentence in state prison. The dogs were cared for by Schneider's husband-and-wife attorneys, Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller, who lived in the same apartment building as Diane Whipple. After the fatal attack, the state brought criminal charges against the attorneys. Robert Noel, who was not present during the attack, was convicted of manslaughter. M arjorie Knoller, who was present, was charged with implied-malice second-degree murder and convicted by the jury. Knoller's murder conviction, an unusual result for an unintended dog attack, was rejected by the trial judge but ultimately upheld. The case clarified the meaning of implied malice murder.

Victim

Whipple was born in Princeton, New Jersey. She grew up and attended high school in Manhasset, New York, on Long Island. She was raised primarily by her grandparents, and was a gifted athlete from a young age. She became a two-time All-American lacrosse player in high school, and later at Penn State. She was twice a member of the U.S. Women's Lacrosse World Cup team.

Whipple later moved to San Francisco, and came within seconds of qualifying for the U.S. 1996 Olympics team in track and field, for the 800 meters. However, she did not compete at the 1996 Olympic Team Trials. She became the lacrosse coach at Saint Mary's College of California in Moraga, California.

At the time of her death, Whipple lived in San Francisco's Pacific Heights with her domestic partner of six years, Sharon Smith.

Attack

On January 26, 2001, after returning home with bags of groceries, Whipple was attacked by two large Perro de Presa Canario dogs in the hallway of her apartment building. The dogs, named Bane and Hera, were cared for by neighbors Marjorie Knoller and her husband Robert Noel.

The dogs' actual owner, Paul Schneider, was a high-ranking member of the prison gang the Aryan Brotherhood who was serving a life sentence in Pelican Bay State Prison. Schneider and his cellmate Dale Bretches were attempting to start an illegal Presa Canario dog-fighting business from prison. They initially asked acquaintances Janet Coumbs and Hard Times Kennel owner/breeder James Kolber of Akron, Ohio to raise the dogs during their incarceration. Against Kolber's advice, Coumbs chained the dogs in a remote corner of the farm, which caused them to become even more aggressive. After Coumbs fell out of favor with Schneider, attorneys Noel and Knoller agreed to take possession of the dogs. They had become acquainted with Schneider while doing legal work for prisoners, and had adopted Schneider (then age 38) as their legal son a few days before the mauling. Bane, the larger of the dogs, weighed 140 pounds (64 kg).

Just prior to the attack, Knoller was taking the dogs up to the roof; Bane â€" and possibly Hera â€" attacked Whipple in the hallway. (Hera's role in the mauling has never been firmly established.) Whipple suffered a total of 77 wounds to every part of her body except her scalp and bottoms of her feet. Another neighbor called 911 after hearing Whipple's screams. Whipple died hours later at San Francisco General Hospital from "loss of blood from multiple traumatic injuries (dog bite wounds)".

Bane was euthanized immediately after the attack; Hera was seized and later euthanized in January 2002.

Whipple's memorial service at St. Mary's College, held on Thursday, February 1, 2001, was attended by more than 400 people.

Legal proceedings against dog owners

In March 2001, a grand jury indicted Knoller and Noel. Knoller was indicted for second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, Noel was indicted for involuntary manslaughter, and "both also face[d] felony charges of keeping a mischievous dog".

At trial, Knoller argued that she had attempted to defend Whipple during the attack. However, witnesses testified that Knoller and Noel had repeatedly refused to control the dogs; a professional dog walker testified that, after she told Noel to muzzle his dogs, he told her to "shut up" and called her offensive names. An acquaintance of Noel's testified that Noel did not apologize after Hera bit him a year before the fatal attack. Ultimately, the jury found both Noel and Knoller guilty of involuntary manslaughter and owning a mischievous animal that caused the death of a human being, and found Knoller guilty of second-degree murder. Their convictions were based on the argument that they knew the dogs were aggressive towards other people and that they did not take sufficient precautions. Whether they had actually trained the dogs to attack and fight remained unclear.

Although the jury found Knoller guilty of second degree murder, trial judge James Warren granted Knoller a new trial on the second-degree murder conviction; the judge believed the appropriate standard for implied malice murder required that Knoller knew taking the dog into the hall involved a high probability of death. Although the judge granted a new trial for the second degree murder charge, he sentenced Knoller to four years in prison for the lesser-included involuntary manslaughter on 15 July 2002. Manslaughter and murder are exclusive: one cannot be convicted of both manslaughter and murder for killing the same person. The state appealed the judge's action and sought to reinstate the second degree murder conviction.

After Knoller's and Noel's convictions in 2002, the State Bar of California suspended their law licenses. Noel was disbarred in February 2007.

On September 14, 2003, Noel was released from prison.

As of early 2004, both Knoller and Noel had served their terms for the manslaughter convictions, and Knoller was out on bail while her second-degree murder conviction was under appeal.

In May 2005, the state appellate court reversed the judge's grant of new second-degree murder trial for Knoller. The appellate court ruled that implied malice murder did not require knowledge of a high probability of death but rather just a conscious disregard of serious bodily injury. The appellate court returned the case to the lower court to reconsider Knoller's motion for a new trial using the serious bodily injury standard for implied malice murder.

Knoller appealed the appellate court decision to the Supreme Court of California.

On June 1, 2007, the California Supreme Court rejected the Court of Appeal's decision and ruled that implied malice murder required proof that a defendant acted with "conscious disregard" of the danger to human life. The Supreme Court held that the trial court's standard for implied malice murder (which required a high probabily of death) was too strict and the appellate court's standard (which required only serious bodily injury rather than a danger to human life) was too broad. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the trial court to reconsider whether to allow the second-degree murder conviction to stand in light of this new reasoning. The San Francisco Superior Court reinstated the conviction for second-degree murder, and on September 22, 2008, the court sentenced Knoller to 15 years to life.

Knoller then appealed the trial court's actions.

On August 23, 2010, the First District Court of Appeal unanimously upheld Knoller's conviction, finding that she acted with a conscious disregard for human life when her Presa Canario escaped and killed Whipple. The California Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal of that decision. Knoller is currently serving her sentence at Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla.

In November 2015, Knoller petitioned the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overturn her second-degree murder conviction. In February 2016, the Ninth Circuit upheld Knoller's second degree murder conviction.

Whipple's partner, Sharon Smith, also succeeded in suing Knoller and Noel for $1,500,000 in civil damages. She donated some of the money to Saint Mary's College of California to fund the women's lacrosse team.