THE NEW YORK TIMES – A Georgia man who the authorities said kept more than 100 dogs in cruel conditions at his home has been sentenced to 475 years in prison after being found guilty last month of dogfighting and cruelty to animals, prosecutors said.
The man, Vincent Lemark Burrell, 57, of Dallas, Ga., was found guilty by a jury on Jan. 30 of 93 counts of dogfighting and 10 counts of cruelty to animals.
The verdict came after a four-day trial in which the authorities said they had found 107 dogs, many of them underweight, scarred and missing teeth, chained up in his yard in 2022, the Paulding County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
Judge Dean C. Bucci of the Paulding County Superior Court gave Mr. Burrell the maximum possible sentence.
The authorities had been acting on a search warrant issued after an Amazon driver raised concerns about the welfare of the dogs, which the driver said he saw chained in the yard, according to the statement.
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Officers sent to Mr. Burrell’s house in Dallas, which is about 32 miles outside of Atlanta, found the dogs, most of them pit bulls, without access to food or water, the Paulding County Sheriff’s Office said at the time.
The dogs, some of which were emaciated, had been tied with heavy chains to trees and left with little to no shelter. Others were boarded in the basement of Mr. Burrell’s house, where the odor of urine and feces was so strong that officers had to wear protective equipment to enter, the Sheriff’s Office said.
They also discovered “numerous items associated with dogfighting,” including a chicken used to entice the dogs, a stick to pry open their jaws, a kit used to treat them after fights and “documents linking Burrell’s dogs to other known dog fighters,” according to the statement …