Matter of The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Presti,

___ AD3d ___, ___ NYS2d ___, 2015 NY Slip Op 00085
Last week I reported the decision of the Third Department rejecting habeas corpus relief for Tommy the chimpanzee. The court held squarely that chimps, regardless of their cognitive abilities, are not “persons” within the meaning of CPLR 7002, and that it would be inappropriate to confer legal rights on them. The Fourth Department here rejects a similar petition on behalf of a chimp named Kiko, but on entirely different grounds. Assuming, for the sake of argument, both that Kiko is a “person” and that the petitioner have standing to seek habeas relief on his behalf, the petition would still be denied on settled principles. The petitioner sought only to have Kiko transferred to a different facility, not to have him released. Habeas corpus does not lie where the challenge is to the conditions of confinement rather than the confinement itself, or where the subject of the proceeding would not be entitled to immediate release.

The petitioner, the Nonhuman Rights Project, maintains a blog, with a fascinating post here concerning the reasons for the trio of New York habeas petitions, and another here concerning the status of the Argentinian proceeding reported in several (apparently overblown) news stories. The Argentinian court did not recognize an orangutan as a legal person.

People ex rel. Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Lavery , ___ AD3d ___, ___ NYS2d ___, 2014 NY Slip Op 08531 [3rd Dept., 2014]

The newspapers have recently reported that an Argentinian court has extended the right to habeas corpus relief to an orangutan.
Here the Third Department rejected a similar petition to extend habeas corpus rights to a chimpanzee named Tommy, but gave it serious consideration on the merits instead of rejecting it out of hand.
The court noted that habeas relief has never been extended to non-human entities. That does not end the discussion, however, for the history of the Great Writ has been one of gradual extension of its reach, in large part due to its flexibility and the very vagueness with which it is expressed in the statute. As grounds for rejecting it in this case, the court pointed to the nature of the social contract, which balances rights against duties and responsibilities. Legal “personhood” is defined in terms of both rights and duties. Since it cannot be said that chimpanzees can bear any legal duties or be held legally accountable for their actions, it would be in the court’s view inappropriate to confer legal rights on them, such as the liberty rights which are the focus of habeas relief. To the extent that the petitioners viewed the rights governing the confinement of animals generally as inappropriate, their redress had to be through the Legislature and not habeas corpus. Read More