Deputy Lindsey Evans

Deputy Lindsey Evans has worked with the Umatilla County Sheriff's office in Pendleton, Oregon since 2004. Growing up an animal lover, Deputy Evans always knew she wanted to be a K9 Deputy. She began putting together the K9 program in 2006 and with the help of the Sheriff's office administration got the program up and running in 2010.

Deputy Evans takes crimes against animals seriously and treats them accordingly. In April 2009, the Umatilla County Sheriff's Office executed a search warrant in Stanfield, Oregon in reference to an animal neglect complaint. When Deputy Evans arrived at the scene, she found quite literally a pile of dead goats as well as many other neglected animals including dogs and horses. The owner, Arnold Weldon Nix, was arrested on 23 counts of animal abuse/neglect. With the intent to seek consecutive sentences, Deputy Evans diligently had each animal tagged or marked and photographed. This involved digging through piles of extremely foul smelling corpses and spending hours in what was a nearly unbearable odor. Despite this, determined to get justice for these animals, Deputy Evans prepared a very thorough police report which was the basis for the work that the prosecutor and everyone else did on this case. Without her police report, time and effort, there is a good chance nothing could have been done.

The D.A. charged the defendant, Nix, with 93 counts of animal neglect, and the case went to jury trial. The jury convicted Nix on 20 counts of second-degree animal neglect, with each count representing a particular injured horse. One would assume 20 guilty verdicts means 20 convictions, but in this case the trial court merged 19 of the 20 counts into one formal conviction. The trial court held that the horses were not "victims" of neglect for purposes of merger – only people can be "victims" – and because all of the animals belonged to a single "owner" (defendant), "the State of Oregon" was the single "victim" of defendant's crimes. The prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Jamie Contreras, took the issue to the Court of Appeals, concerned that other trial courts might follow suit, meaning that the state would have serious problems prosecuting hoarding cases – if you neglected your own animals, it wouldn't matter if you had 2 or 200, you would be convicted on a single count of animal neglect. The Animal Legal Defense Fund filed an amicus curiae brief in the Court of Appeals that supports the state's position. A ruling in the appeal is still pending.