Hello; Dogs are not people and do not have the legal rights of people, at least so far. My understanding being dogs are considered property. People can usually be communicated with to possibly get some understanding of why an act has been committed. As far as I know there is no such way to find out what is in the mind of a dog.
Here is a gotcha question. Given that a dog bite is something that should not be considered an accident. Meaning that for whatever reason the dog did bite on purpose. So outside of accidents what would happen to a human who deliberately caused enough injury to a two year old child for a lot of stitches? The only one I can think of that would not be considered assault might be the act of another small child, but it seems sort of likely "accident" might cover that. So, put the dog in prison to be equal of a human or what?
This notion of placing such a dog in a setting with no small children and an aware owner has been posted in other threads. The brave person who takes in such an animal will be taking on a lot of potential liability. Were I to be a neighbor of such a situation and had small children, that would not seem a good solution. There would always be a possibility for the animal to get in contact with children. Could be done I suppose, but I would want more detail about who pays and how such a deal would be overseen.
My take has been that over time as we humans domesticated animals, some were found to be too risky to keep as pets. Folks keep them in secure cages of some sort. Big cats, bears, lynxand such.
I watched a PBS program some time ago about trying to domesticate a type of wild fox. I think this was for the fur trade. The best I can recall they sorted the individual animals for aggression. The plan being, I think, to breed a line that could be more safely handled. It worked to some degree. They were able to get a line of less aggressive animals that behaved much like domesticated dogs. I think there were also some individual lines where this selection did not work and they remained too aggressive. One irony of this selective breeding experiment being that as the foxes became more domesticated (tamed) their fur lost the distinctive coloration that made the wild foxes so valued. This experiment should be something that can be looked up.
My point in bringing this up being that it is my understanding that aggressiveness was bred out of the wild dog stocks by selecting the more docile and culling the more aggressive. Also that in a very large population the "gene pool" can harbor a lot of traits that generally remain hidden in large portions of the population. Every now and then some combination of these genes will be expressed in an individual, usually considered more rare. My thinking being that some individual dogs are going to be more aggressive than most. It seems wise to either cull those individuals or at the very least have them neutered. I am old school and from a time when we simply put down a biting dog.
