In an interesting, if sometimes not quite legal (a few have been overturned) trend in sentencing among judges has been the use of "novel" sentencing of offenders for various crimes.

Shawn Gementera must have known that he would face some kind of punishment after a police officer nabbed him and a friend in the act of stealing letters from mailboxes along San Francisco's Fulton Street four years ago. While jail or probation might have crossed Gementera's mind, U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker had a more creative idea. Walker sentenced Gementera to stand outside a post office while wearing a sign that read: "I stole mail. This is my punishment." Where the judge saw a novel way of conveying society displeasure with mail theft, Gementera's lawyers saw a violation of the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit decided, however, that while the humiliating sentence might be unusual, it wasn't cruel.
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· In Kentucky, Judge Michael Caperton recently allowed drug and alcohol offenders to skip drug counseling if they agreed to go to 10 church services. A pastor, like a divinely ordained probation officer, signs off on the completion of this obligation.

· In Texas in 2003, Judge Buddie Hahn gave an abusive father a choice between spending 30 nights in jail or 30 nights sleeping in the doghouse where prosecutors alleged the man had forced his 11-year-old stepson to sleep.

· In Georgia last year, Judge Sidney Nation suspended almost all of Brenton Jay Raffensperger's seven-year sentence for cocaine possession and driving under the influence in exchange for his promise to buy a casket and keep it in his home to remind him of the costs of drug addiction.

· In Ohio, a municipal judge, Michael Cicconetti, cut a 120-day jail sentence down to 45 days for two teens who, on Christmas Eve 2002, had defaced a statue of Jesus they stole from a church's nativity scene. In exchange, the pair had to deliver a new statue to the church and march through town with a donkey and a sign reading "Sorry for the Jackass Offense."

· In North Carolina in 2002, Judge James Honeycutt ordered four young offenders who broke into a school and did $60,000 in damage to wear signs around their necks in public that read "I AM A JUVENILE CRIMINAL." One, a 14-year-old girl, appealed and Honeycutt was reversed.