An Oregon man didn’t get his cat back but he could be almost $1.4 million richer after a jury decided in his favor in a cat-napping case.
Joshua Smith, 41, adopted a cat he named Frank in 2017 after finding the little guy, apparently a stray, in an alley.
At the time Smith was living in a single room in a group drug recovery home in Portland, according to the Oregonian. The terms of his lease didn’t allow him to keep pets so when Smith’s landlord — a man named Devon Andrade — discovered Smith had been keeping a cat, Andrade took matters into his own hands and stole Frank, admitting under oath he’d taken the tabby and given it to his girlfriend, who then took Frank to a local shelter.
Smith and Frank were never reunited: It turns out Frank has a microchip and he was returned to his original family, the people who were his caretakers before he went missing and Smith discovered him more than six years ago.
But it took a jury less than two hours to decide against Andrade and Pine Street LLC, the company behind Pine Street Recovery Housing. The defense argued that even though Andrade should not have acted unilaterally, Smith was still in violation of his lease agreement, but the jurors weren’t buying it.
“The jury’s message should be loud and clear to landlords,” said Michael Fuller, Smith’s lawyer. “You need to respect the rights of tenants, especially when it comes to pets.”
The jury awarded Smith a shocking $1.375 million although it’s not clear how much of that Smith will see. An earlier story, published in 2019, said Smith had sought $250,000 in damages. It’s not clear why the jury went with the much larger amount.
Fuller credits the jury, saying there were several sympathetic animal lovers in the juror box.
Smith said he’s been successfully sober for years. He’s since married, moved to California and opened his own barber shop.
“The most important thing was that I got my day in court,” Smith said. “I got really lucky because I told the truth, no matter what.”
via Pain In The Bud