Tag Archives: law

Here are some examples of creative sentencing that I applaud.

• Judge Mike Erwin of Baton Rouge first ventured out of the rulebook in the early 1990s. A young man hit an elderly man in an argument “over something really stupid.” Erwin ordered him to listen to a John Prine song, Hello in There, about lonely old people and write an essay about it.
• In 2007, criminal defense attorney Michael Steven Sherman of Wexford, Pa., asked a Butler County judge to reconsider making his client carry a photograph of the man she killed in a car accident after his family chose a photograph of the man in his coffin.
• Judge Larry Standley in Harris County TX added mandatory Yoga classes to a jail sentence for a man accused of slapping his wife.
• Matthew R. Willis will serve 30 days every year for a decade on the anniversary of the crash that killed a passenger in his car. He had been speeding and driving carelessly.
• Every Friday for the next 10 years, as part of his sentence, Brandon Blenden must write a $1 check and mail it the parents of a girl who he killed while driving drunk. He must also write in the memo, “for the death of your daughter Whitney.”