Those Detroit judges certainly don’t play around!
A 15-year-old girl on a field trip to a courthouse was handcuffed, forced to wear a jail uniform and threatened with jail for contempt of court by a judge as punishment for falling asleep in his courtroom.
“It wasn’t so much, in fact, that she had fallen asleep because I have attorneys that fall asleep sometimes, so that’s not too big of a deal. It was her whole attitude and her whole disposition that disturbed me,” Judge Kenneth King tells ABC News affiliate WXYZ-TV. “I wanted to get through to her, show how serious this is and how you are to conduct yourself inside of a courtroom.”
The judge asked the other students to vote on whether the teen should be sent to the detention facility, but they voted in favor of letting her go.
“Was I really going to do that? Probably not. Could I have? Probably so. But that’s not what I want to do to a kid who’s there on a field trip,” King tells the outlet. “Do I think I was heavy handed in what I did? No, I don’t. Because I’ll do whatever it needs to be done to reach these kids and make sure that they don’t end up in front of me.”
Now King is getting a taste of his own medicine — he has been temporarily removed from his bench, according to ABC News.
Now who’s scared straight?