Woman Ordered to Spend Night in Woods for Abandoning Kittens - ABC News
An Ohio woman will spend a night in the woods without water, food or entertainment as part of her punishment for abandoning 35 kittens.
Painesville Municipal Court Judge Michael A. Cicconetti handed down the sentence on Nov. 17 to Michelle M. Murray, 25. On Sept. 19, park rangers found the kittens abandoned in two parks in Mentor, Ohio. Many of the kittens had upper respiratory infections and nine later died. They were traced back to Murray because they were wearing identification collars.
"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?" Cicconetti asked the defendant.
Murray, a mother of three children and two stepchildren, said the kittens were left on her doorstep by a stranger and the local Humane Society refused to help. The Humane Society disputes that claim.
Cicconetti gave Murray a choice between 90 days in jail for domestic animal abandonment or 14 days in jail, 15 days under house arrest, a $3,200 donation to the Humane Society a $500 donation to the park rangers who found the kittens and one night alone in the woods.
Murray chose the latter. She will report to the local jail today, where a park ranger will take her to a remote location. She will be picked up again on Thanksgiving morning. Originally, Cicconetti said Murray was to have no food, reading material or entertainment devices and was to have only the clothes she wore -- as many as she wanted -- to keep her warm. Due to plunging temperatures, however, the judge said he may amend his orders and allow her to make a fire.
History of Crime-Appropriate Sentences
This isn't Cicconetti's first unusual sentence:
He has ordered a man who hollered "pigs" to police officers to stand on a street corner next to a 350-pound pig with a sign that read, "This is not a police officer."
After an 18-year-old man stole some porn from an adult bookstore, the judge ordered him to sit outside the shop in a chair, wearing a blindfold, and holding a sign saying "See No Evil" so that passing traffic could see him.
Cicconetti punished a group of high school students who vandalized school buses by making them throw a picnic for a group of grade-school students whose outing was canceled because of the stunt.
A nanny accused of hitting a little boy with a belt was given a folder of articles on the consequences of child abuse, and compelled to read them all, and then discuss them in the courtroom in front of the judge and the victim's mother, as spectators looked on. Afterward, the mother agreed to no jail time for the nanny.
Effectiveness of Creative Sentencing
Cicconetti said he can remember just two people who have been sentenced to alternative punishments and reoffended.
One of them was a man who ran from the police and was offered a reduced jail sentence if he agreed to train for a five-mile race. The man stayed in shape, and a few months later, he grabbed a woman's purse and ran with it.
Cicconetti said he began offering creative sentencing when he was getting lots of cases of people speeding in school zones. Eventually he got sick of it, and thought why not force these people to confront the danger they are creating?
He offered violators a choice: Have their license suspended for 90 days, or have it suspended for a shorter period and spend one day working as a crossing guard. He said those violators who spent a day shepherding schools kids across the street never appeared in his courtroom for speeding again, even if they previously had multiple offenses.
Cicconetti eventually expanded his creative sentencing to other crimes, but stressed he offers them rarely and never as punishment for a violent offense.
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<img src="/pixel/p-9e_QHc34iBt22.gif?labels=" style="display:" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt="Quantcast"/>At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR
At The Movies, The Women Are Gone
I live in the D.C. metro area, which is a very good place to find films. If you don't live in New York or Los Angeles, it's about the best you can do. I'm within 10 miles of a multiplicity of multiplexes, not to mention four theaters I would consider "art house" theaters or at least mixes of wider-appeal fare and smaller stuff.
According to Fandango and some back-of-the-envelope math, excluding documentaries and animation, there are 617 movie showings today — that's just today, Friday — within 10 miles of my house.
Of those 617 showings, 561 of them — 90 percent — are stories about men or groups of men, where women play supporting roles or fill out ensembles primarily focused on men. The movies making up those 561 showings: Man Of Steel (143), This Is The End (77), The Internship (52), The Purge (49), After Earth (29), Now You See Me (56), Fast & Furious 6 (44), The Hangover Part III (16), Star Trek Into Darkness (34), The Great Gatsby (16), Iron Man 3 (18), Mud (9), The Company You Keep (4), Kings Of Summer (9), and 42 (5).
Thirty-one are showings of movies about balanced pairings or ensembles of men and women: Before Midnight (26), Shadow Dancer (4), and Wish You Were Here (1).
Twenty-five are showings of movies about women or girls: The East (8), Fill The Void (4), Frances Ha (9), and What Maisie Knew (4).
Of the seven movies about women or balanced groups, only one — the Israeli film Fill The Void — is directed by a woman, Rama Burshtein. That's also the only one that isn't about a well-off white American. (Well, Celine in Before Midnight is well-off, white and French, but she's been living in the U.S.)
There are nearly six times as many showings of Man Of Steel alone as there are of all the films about women put together.
If I were limited to multiplexes, as people are in many parts of the country, the numbers would be worse. In many places, the number would be zero. Frances Ha is by far the most widely available of the four women-centered movies, and it's at 213 theaters this weekend in the entire country. The East is at 115. What Maisie Knew is at 51. Fill The Void looks like it's in about 20 locations, judging by .
The Internship is at 3,399.*
[*Note: I originally had understood these. Not a huge difference with non-blockbusters less likely to play on multiple screens at the same place, and if anything, makes the possible disparity with something like The Internship greater, but it's different nonetheless. This doesn't affect the numbers for my own local theaters, though — those are just individual showtimes counted by hand.]
I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn't a documentary or a cartoon — you can't. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any.
By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that's at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (at 891 theaters) so I hope you like it. Because it's pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.
Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.
Somebody asked me this morning what "the women" are going to do about this. I don't know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?
They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by "we," I do I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says "win some, lose some" and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every "surprise success" about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.
Nobody remembers, it seems, how many people said Bridesmaids would fail. And it didn't! But it didn't matter.
My answer is that I have no idea what the women are going to do about it. It helps when critics, including men, care about the way women artists are treated and make it their problem to share, as Sam Adams did yesterday in a
about Sofia Coppola. It helps when people go out of their way to see any kind of film that's about people other than themselves. It helps when we acknowledge that what we have right now is a Hollywood entertainment business that has pretty much entirely devoted itself to telling men's stories — and to the degree that's for business reasons, it's because they've gotten the impression we've devoted ourselves to listening to men's stories.
But for crying out loud, let's at least notice. When it's 90 percent here, it's much worse elsewhere.
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