Walk a mile in your shoes

I've never been to Lake County, Ohio.  Never even been to Ohio, but I like this judge they have there, Judge Michael A. Cicconetti, who is really great at making the punishment fit the crime.

I have whiled away many an hour, often while being paid for doing something else, imagining myself as a judge.  Black robe, gavel, stern bailiff, the whole deal.

And in every courtroom scenario that unreels in my mind, I always hand down sentences  that the entire court finds just perfect - even the person I had just found guilty - because I would take driver's licenses away from people who abuse that privilege by driving drunk or too fast, make vandals repair whatever they damaged, and send big business moguls who cheated widows out of their meager homes off to hard time on a rockpile for 20 years.
OK. The moguls did not like it, but everyone knows, when a kid breaks a window with a rock, the child learns a lesson by having to give up his allowance to pay for the new window.  Sure, it's a "pane," but you gotta learn, right?

I'll bet that Victoria Bascom learned her lesson.  Ms Bascom is a resident of Lake County who recently found herself in need of a lift from Cleveland to Painesville.

(Ohio must be the sort of state where people willingly go to a town called Painesville.)

She called a cab, rode in the cab, and, upon arriving at her destination, got out of the cab, which is all standard procedure, except that she got out and ran like a thief in the night, which she kind of is, for doing that....

Ms Bascom

Apparently the cab driver could run just as fast as she, and she was caught and taken before His Honor Judge Cicconnetti, who reasoned that she took the cab on a 30-mile ride, so she should take a 30-mile walk to think about what she did, or serve 60 days in the Ironbar Hilton.

And pay back the cab company the $100 fare she tried to beat, and serve four months of probation.

She strapped on a GPS device and some good walking shoes and started hoofing around the Lake County Fairgrounds on Friday.

Joe Walsh and The James Gang were from Cleveland, right? Maybe she's heard their big hit, "Walk Away."