5

A Month in a Doghouse

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Curtis Robin was a bit of a bad man, the sort of fellow who might, say, beat a child with a car antenna. That's a shitty thing to do, and you would think, if caught and put on trial for it, you'd get some manner of appropriate punishment. Like time in jail, for instance. But that did not happen to Mr. Robin.

Unlike Chris Brown, Robin wasn't allowed to pretend to pick up trash on the side of the road or continue to make objectionable music. Instead, he was sent to the doghouse. Isn't that a hilarious expression? In this case, it was real. In a deal that was surely born in an opium den somewhere in Texas after a few rounds of autoerotic asphyxia, Robin and prosecutors agreed that he could spend 30 consecutive nights in a 2-foot-by-3-foot doghouse so that he could avoid both jail time and losing his job, because God knows if you beat a child with a metal whip, actually having to go to jail or lose your job as a result would be an unbearable price to pay. It was just a child, after all; they're not even as heavy as adults, so they probably can't feel as much pain.

4

Dinner at Red Lobster

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On a scale of Tyler Perry to Dave Chappelle, how funny is Red Lobster? If you said Mitch Hedberg, you'd be correct -- Red Lobster is quite hilarious under the right circumstances. I was even about to call it the Olive Garden of seafood restaurants when I realized that joke was made only recently by Adam Tod Brown, which means clearly everyone gets the game over at the Rodster (that's the hip street name for Red Lobster -- use it with cool kids, but never tell your folks).

So how does Red Lobster fit into an article about novel punishments for crimes? Was some poor schlub sentenced to work at Red Lobster? Eat at Red Lobster? Stop your comedy speculation, kids -- this dude was sentenced to date at Red Lobster. That's some crass shit right there.

I get that when you're 16 and you want to take out a girl (or guy, or "other," because you're progressive like that), Red Lobster is the fanciest restaurant you can both afford and have ever heard of. But you and I both know, and this includes those of you who sincerely like Red Lobster, that this is no place for romance. You know how we both know Red Lobster isn't a place for l'amour? Name any other point in your life when your seduction technique may include breaking open the legs of a lesser being and sucking out the meat.

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3

Classical Music

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Sometimes a judge comes up with a sentence that is mind boggling not in its cruelty but in its "for fuck's sakery." Where previous perpetrators may have been forced to pay massive fines or face jail terms, a judge comes up with some summer camp style bullshit you'd be lucky to have to deal with for no reason at all, let alone as a punishment. This is one of those cases, compounded in its stupidity by the fact the idiot turned it down and opted for the real punishment.

In this case, Andrew Vactor, whose last name is Welsh for "this lead paint is delicious," was cited for listening to some rap music too loudly in his car. Of all the crimes in all the world, this is clearly one of the lamest, and it carried with it a stunning $150 fine. However, Vactor could have had his fine reduced to $35, which is exactly what I spend on wieners and bourbon every weekend, if only he'd spend 20 hours listening to some classical music, like Bach.

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2

Thanksgiving Dinner

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In Ohio, 46-year-old Valerie Rodgers was arrested on felony assault charges and some misdemeanor traffic violations after she was confused by a traffic officer directing traffic and knocked him right on his ass in the middle of the street. Normally you'd expect this kind of menace to face the chair, or at least to have to fight for her life in a pit against subhuman mutants and post-apocalyptic hero types. You know how it goes. Instead, the judge sentenced her to cook Thanksgiving dinner for some cops.

How does making Thanksgiving dinner for police officers relate in any way to nearly running one over because you don't understand traffic signals? Follow me on this one. Thanksgiving is, of course, a harvest festival often linked to the wonderful sense of community enjoyed by both pilgrims and Native Americans. The Native Americans were sometimes known to communicate with smoke signals, which were hard for others to understand. Valerie Rodgers, in this case, had a hard time understanding traffic signals, and also gave a police officer smallpox. Or something like that. Thus, a cooked turkey and cranberry sauce fixes everything. It's almost too easy.

1

Total Insanity

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For a fun change of pace, I thought I'd shake things up with the most novel punishment for a crime I've ever heard of -- experiencing what the victim experienced. In theory, this isn't novel, it's "an eye for an eye," which is a standard all over the world. You piss on my rug, I piss on yours, Lebowski style. How could this be made interesting? Only if someone had committed the most crazy-as-a-Lysol-huffing-hobo crime you ever heard of. And then made it worse.

Javed Iqbal was a very bad sort of man in Pakistan, as in he was convicted of murdering over 100 young boys. He's the sort of guy that nightmares are afraid of. And he was caught for his crimes and put before a judge who was not the sort of man to not be staggeringly insane in his sentencing. So instead of jail time, instead of torture, instead of even a typical death penalty, Iqbal was sentenced to experience what his victims experienced -- he would be strangled to death in front of the parents of his victims, after which his body would be cut into 100 pieces, and then those pieces would be dissolved in acid.

If you need to take a minute to take that sentence in, by all means. Imagine how the courtroom handled that. It was probably a mix of "Holy shit!" combined with the way I imagine Michael Bay feels when he has an orgasm that doesn't involve an open fire.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, I'm not sure what word works in this sentence), Iqbal headed his sentence off at the pass and killed himself in prison, so his sentence couldn't be carried out, but it did end with him just as dead, so that's something. I tried to find out if they cut him to pieces, but I couldn't find anything definitive. I'll assume they didn't, though, since it would have been anticlimactic at that point.