We, as humans, should be well aware of the consequences our acts bring. Still, we do bad things and hurt others, although we know it would put us in big trouble. Luckily, no deed goes unpunished and this judge from Painesville, Ohio, named Mike Cicconetti knows just the perfect way to punish those who treat animals in a bad manner.
His creative and sort of unusual methods made him a real celebrity in the community. Needless to say, he’s got all the support from his fellow Ohioans doing so.
Cicconetti is a huge animal lover and gets really mad and disappointed when a case of animal abuse or neglect comes along his way at the courtroom. What he does with such cases is give the doers of the crime punishments similar to what they did to the poor souls.
This way, he makes the wrongdoers go through the same discomfort they created at the animals. He believes that this is the only way for the cruel people to really understand how the animals felt when they abused them, neglected them, or dumped them.
“A judge can simply follow the law and if somebody committed the crime, here are the possible penalties,” Cicconetti told ABC News’ “Nightline.” “How much of that do I impose? Sure, you can do that and you go home and you can rest easy. Or you can take each case a little more personal and still apply that same law.”
When a woman was brought at the courtroom for dumping 35 kittens in the woods, judge Cicconetti gave her two options. Either to serve full jail time or reduce it by spending a night at the woods herself. She was so embarrassed of her action that she did accept to go into the woods and see how the poor kittens must have felt like when she ditched them there.
You have to agree this is a great way of teaching wrongdoers a lesson.
As he addressed the guilty woman, he asked her, “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?”
Another woman was charged and found guilty of neglecting her dog by keeping him in filth. Now if she wanted to reduce her jail time, judge Cicconetti gave her an offer she ‘couldn’t refuse’, although it meant spending eight hours at the filthiest county dump.
Addressing the woman, he told her, “I want you to go down to the county dump, to the landfill, and I want them to find the stinkiest, smelliest, God-awful odor place they can find in that dump and I want you to sit there for eight hours tomorrow, to think about what you did to that dog while you smell the odor. If you puke, you puke.”
Does this way of sentencing animal abusers work? Yes, it does magic actually as the repeat offender rate for people who end up at Judge Cicconetti’s courtroom is only 10 percent compared to the 75 percent in other courts.
This amazing judge is to retire this years and we really hope someone as special would take his place and continue giving creative sentences.
You can take a look at Judge Cicconetti’s amazing work in the video below.