Some crimes are difficult for the ordinary person to understand, and cruelty to animals is one of them. That anyone would hurt a defenceless creature reliant on them for care is inexplicable for most people. And a US judge is one of them.
But unlike most, Michael Cicconetti from Painesville (no pun intended) in Ohio isn’t relatively powerless to act. Tired of seeing animal abusers receiving little punishment for their offences, he’s won fans worldwide for the unusual, if not cruel, sentences he’s handed out to the people who land in his courtroom – and they don’t usually include prison time.
Instead, he believes in an eye for an eye, or something very similar. One woman abandoned a 35 kittens in the woods was sentenced to spend a night in the same woods herself (as well as time in jail and a fine).
“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?” he asked, according to reports.
A man who threw a puppy out of a sixth-floor apartment window was lucky not to get similar treatment. “You are revolting. You are cruel. You are inhuman, what you did here,” the judge told the man. ” “Would I like to put you in a Dumpster? Oh, yeah. I would love to do that.” In this case, however, the 24-year-old man was a repeat offender so he had to be given six months in prison instead.
Another man, who shot his dog in the head had his jail time cut by Ciccconetti, but only after he agreed to wear a ‘safety pup’ costume on visits to schools to teach children about personal security. (The Safety Pup program, created by the US National Child Safety Council, is run by police departments around the country.) Meanwhile, a woman who allowed her dog to live in a squalid backyard was sentenced to a day sitting amongst the smelliest garbage the local refuse centre could find.
It’s not just animal cruelty cases that attract some of Cicconetti’s more unusual sentences. He’s been doing this since the mid-1990s after becoming frustrated at the number of repeat offenders he encountered in his courtroom, and decided that some discomfort and embarrassment might be a better deterrent than a night in jail or a fine.
Over the years since, he’s forced a man who called a police officer a “pig” to stand beside an actual pig with a sign that said “This is not a police officer”. A woman who skipped out on a taxi fare was forced to walk the 30 miles the fair covered, while wearing a GPS tracker so the judge could monitor that she’d completed the punishment. People caught with loaded guns have been ordered to work with corpses at the morgue, and a man caught soliciting prostitutes on the street was made to stand on a street corner in a chicken suit, while holding a sign that said “No chicken ranch in our city”.
He even permitted a woman who had pepper-sprayed a man to believe that she was going to be pepper-sprayed herself in the courtroom, leaving her to sweat for a while before the ‘spraying’ – when she found that the burning liquid had been replaced by water.
A proud grandfather, Cicconetti is currently serving his fifth and final term as Painesville Municipal Court Judge – a position he’s held for the past 23 years – and he prides himself and his staff on running the court like a well-oiled machine. He told Attorney At Law magazine just last month that his creative sentencing worked “most of the time”.
“I say that because there have been hundreds of alternative or creative sentences that do not receive media attention. These are not headline grabbing sentences but nonetheless designed to fit the crime,” the judge explained.
“A violation of a school bus law might find the offender acting as a school crossing guard for the day, a repeat dog-at-large offender cleaning kennels for the dog warden, a shoplifter providing canned food to a food bank, a litterer picking up trash during the county fair or along the shores of Lake Erie, or other non-violent offenders tending to the court garden to feed those in need. In actuality, jail and fines are really the alternate sentences in my court.”
He recalled that one of his most effective sentences was one he meted out to an 18-year-old man who abused his mother. Faced with jail, the man chose to wash his own mouth out with soap and apologise to his mother instead, he told Attorney at Law.
“The soap swallowing was hilarious but when he turned to apologise to mom, the tears flowed heavily,” Cicconetti remembered. “He was placed on probation, with his mom appointed as his probation officer and given a list of weekly chores and no further disrespect to his mom who was to report any violations to me. I ran into mom a couple years later (she had to remind me of the case) and was delighted the sentence turned her son around who was successfully employed, continued to help her, and has never violated the law since.”