From Beitbart/AP.
Andrew Vactor was facing a $150 fine for playing rap music too loudly on his car stereo in July. But a judge offered to reduce that to $35 if Vactor spent 20 hours listening to classical music by the likes of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.
Vactor, 24, lasted only about 15 minutes, a probation officer said.It wasn’t the music, Vactor said, he just needed to be at practice with the rest of the Urbana University basketball team.
“I didn’t have the time to deal with that,” he said. “I just decided to pay the fine.”
That’s only a little over a $5.00 an hour savings for listening to, as they said in college “serious music”. Not enough to entice a youngster.
Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott says the idea was to force Vactor to listen to something he might not prefer, just as other people had no choice but to listen to his loud rap music.
“I think a lot of people don’t like to be forced to listen to music,” she said.
She’s also taped TV shows for defendants in other cases to watch on topics such as financial responsibility. As she sees it, they get the chance to have their fine reduced “and at the same time broaden their horizons.”
As much as I normally dislike creative sentencing, I’ll give you a “nice try” on this one judge. You probably failed in the broadening horizons department but, maybe the guy got some of the point when he figured out, after 15 minutes, that he would rather just pay the dough.
Now, if the average offender is only going to last the 15 minutes; maybe you should have them check out some “volume and violence that makes most rock bands sound tame”.
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Tags: Andrew Vactor, creative sentencing, Ohio
Pat Darnell and Friends wrote,
I am supposing when Wolfgang was jailed for hearing Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere in performance once in the Sistine Chapel then wrote it out in its entirety from memory, only returning to correct minor errors; thus producing the first illegal copy of this closely-guarded property of the Vatican… and performed it “on the stage with his crimson pelisse and gold-laced cocked hat, in contempt for sampling another’s music:
and — Mozart’s striking fondness for scatological and sexual humor, scandalously write scatological music, the canon “Leck mich im Arsch”… did not help his case one bit…
As a punishment…they made him listen to his late symphonies, unfinished requiem, and concertos screwed down to last a minimum of 20 hours… as rap, screw, chop, hip hop, houston, local, texas, pressing, grafix, graphics, beats, dirty third, third coast, gulf, Latin Reggaeton all DJ screwed down and skratched… kromatica… wineberry over gold strictly for da streets…
Where da’ judge dat judged Mozart applied Lessing’s argument: “What is the good of having the right beliefs if we do not live rightly?”
So that upon release after his twenty hours, Amadeus simply removed his fedora — a fedora that has been pinched at the front and worn pushed back on the head, with the front of the brim bent down over the eyes — and quoted the master: “”Behold, I am Funkadelic. I am not of your world. But fear me not, I will do you no harm. Loan me your funky mind and I shall play with it. For nothing is good unless you play with it. And all that is good, is nasty!” (What Is Soul, Funkadelic, 1969)
Link | October 10th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Sans Direction wrote,
I fail to appreciate classical music. Really. I can show you my college transcripts.
Link | October 10th, 2008 at 8:17 am