Domestic violence offender throws puppy out of sixth-floor window
Ohio judge tells Michael Sutton: ‘I would love to put you in a dumpster'
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Your support makes all the difference.The judge in Ohio who convicted a man of throwing a puppy out of a sixth-floor window told him he would like to put the 23-year-old in a rubbish bin.
Municipal court judge Michael Cicconetti told Michael Sutton that “all he could do” was put Mr Sutton behind bars for six months and keep him on probation for five years, but what he and “a lot of other people” would like is to give him “one of those creative sentences”.
“You are just vicious. You are revolting. You are cruel,” he said.
“Oh, would I like to put you in a dumpster? Hell, yeah,” he added. “I would love to do that.”
The body of the puppy was found near Mr Sutton’s apartment in a rubbish compactor.
According to Fox affiliate WJW, Mr Sutton told police he threw the lab-pit bull mix called Knox out of the window as it urinated on his bed.
Mr Sutton, a repeat offender, has already spent time behind bars for domestic violence as he “broke his mother’s ribs“ and beat the mother of his child while she was in hospital, and later at home while she was holding the baby, according to the judge.
In a video on WKYC, Mr Cicconetti lamented how many people blame their crimes on “mental illness”, like the 23-year-old, and receive money from the state for medication yet fail to take it.
“I am sick and tired of people coming in here and blaming this on mental illness,” the judge continued. “Then we have to get you medication. We have to pay for it, and then you don't take it. Where does that leave a court? I know what I'd like to do. I'd like to give you one of those creative sentences, but that's for people who can be rehabilitated, people who are first offenders. You are not. You are not one of those people. You are just brutal and savage, and that's all there is to it.”
Mr Sutton has been banned from ever owning an animal again.
“I wish I could say you’re not allowed to be around people, because look what you do,” said Mr Cicconetti.
The judge is infamous in the region for handing out so-called creative sentences.
According to the Chicago Tribune, he ordered a man who called a police officer a “pig” to stand beside a live pig with a sign that read: “This is not a police officer”. Another time he forced a woman who abandoned ill kittens to spend one night in the woods with food or water.
“We started small,” Mr Cicconetti told the News-Herald in 2012. ”It was more out of frustration because after a year or two years, we were seeing the same people come back, with the same offenses. I thought, 'There has to be a better way to do this.’“
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