i remember the days when criminals were either fined or sent to prison.
1. fashion policed
last year in delaware a superior court judge sentenced russell teeter to 60 days in jail for exposing himself to a 10 year old girl. obviously not believing this to be punishment enough (more jail time?) the judge also demanded that mr teeter wear a t-shirt bearing the statement ‘i am a registered sex offender’ to work for 2 years.
2. toothbrush justice
just last month a 73 year old man was caught taking metal from scrapyards under false pretenses. he told yard owners that the metal donations would be used to build a memorial for soldiers in iraq only to sell the metal and pocket the cash. judge a.t. frank decided that philip kolinski’s sentence should include cleaning the war memorial outside the governmental centre using a toothbrush. he was also accompanied by a placard saying ‘i stole from veterans’.
genius.
3. dishing out a sentence
19 year old donna shelby went out for a meal at a local restaurant in august 2006 and then decided that she didn’t want to pay for the food. so she got up and ran from the building. when the case reached court the judge, after apparently finding no other punishment to fit the crime, ordered the diner-dasher to spend a day in the kitchen of the local jail washing the convicts’ dishes. judge chichester, who’s possibly a bit mental, claimed he came up with the idea after remembering a tv show where characters had to wash dishes in the restaurant to cover their food bill.
4. whiskey plates
if you happen to be driving around minnesota i advise you to watch out for vehicles with license plates that start with the letter ‘w’.
any person convicted of drunk driving more than once is given one of these special ‘whiskey plates’ in order to let the public and authorities know of their previous convictions. dunno about you but i can see this causing a few accidents as sober drivers try to keep as far away as possible for fear of injury.
5. the annual prison day-trip
this one’s slightly fucked up. in 2004, a woman named tiffany nix drove into and killed a schoolchild whilst on opiates and amphetamines. the judge, rather than locking her up for a considerable period of time, sentenced nix to 10 seperate jail sentences of 1 day each on the anniversary of the child’s death, her last day in prison being september 28th, 2015.
the child’s parents were said to be happy with the sentence.
6. a fowl sentence
judge michael cicconetti in ohio ordered 3 men to stand outside a court wearing chicken suits holding a sign that read ‘no chicken ranch in painesville’ after they were caught soliciting women for sex.
the chicken suit is apparently a reference to a huge legal whorehouse in nevada called the chicken ranch. the men were caught after they tried to pay an undercover police officer to do the dirty. there’s a bbc news report to watch that includes a brief interview with one of the chickens here.
7. if you go down to the woods today…
in 2005, a heartless twat by the name of michelle murray abandoned 35 kittens in 2 seperate parks in ohio. when rangers discovered the kittens many had infections and 9 later died. as part of the sentence, the judge had ms murray taken to a remote location in the woods where she was left for 1 night without food, water and entertainment.
whilst sentencing murray, the judge apparently said, “how would you like to be dumped off at a metro park late at night, spend the night listening to the coyotes … , listening to the raccoons around you in the dark night, and sit out there in the cold not knowing where you’re going to get your next meal, not knowing when you are going to be rescued?”.
fuck that! he should have said, “how would you like to be dumped off at park when you’re too small to fend for yourself only to die a few days later?” and then had her shot.
8. swine!
and finally, my favourite. to punish a man who called a policeman a ‘pig’, the same judge that presided over the chicken case, michael cicconetti, made a man stand next to a real pig for a day whilst holding a sign that read, ‘this is not a police officer’. beautiful.
