Cool And Unusual Punishment / Real Life

• After Napoléon Bonaparte had been defeated in the Battle of Laon, the victors exiled him to the island of Elba. They gave him sovereignty of the island and its inhabitants. They couldn't match Napoleon's cool, though, given that he escaped while they were distracted. It was a meaningless island with barely working infrastructure. A few months under Napoleon's governorship, and the island was running like clockwork. It was at this point he got bored again and thought about taking back France.
• There was a judge known for his unusual sentencing, among the examples:
  • Forcing a man to stand on a street corner with a pig, holding a sign that says "This is not a police officer" after evading arrest and calling a cop a pig.
    • Michael Cicconetti from Painsville, OH. Other highlights: sentencing a woman who abandoned kittens in a forest to spend a night in the woods alone with no food and only the clothes on her back, sentencing a man who stole from a Salvation Army kettle to spend 24 hours homeless, and man who stole pornography was sentenced to standing outside the shop blindfolded and holding a sign saying "See no evil".
  • Similarly, a Denver man who got caught using a dummy to sneak into the high occupancy vehicle lane on the highway was sentenced to stand by the road with a sign saying "The HOV Lane Is Not For Dummies."
  • Another set of youths had to read classic lit., and write book reports.
  • Sounds like Ted Poe, who now represents TX-2 in Congress. He loved doing that kind of thing.
• According to this article, police officers in Bangkok may be punished for minor infractions by being forced to wear a Hello Kitty armband.
• Rumors have circulated that when Saddam Hussein was detained by the US military, he was forced to watch the scenes from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut showing him as Satan's gay lover. Over and over again.
• Antanas Mockus, mayor of Bogota, Colombia, hired 420 mimes to curb traffic violations by ridiculing jaywalkers and reckless drivers, and encouraging other pedestrians to do the same. And it worked.
• Legal humour blog Lowering the Bar categorises these incidents as "Creative Sentencing". For instance:
  • Noise Ordinance Violators Sentenced to Easy Listening
  • Aspiring artist allowed to post bail for illegal drug use if he comes to court for three days to draw lawyers
  • Convicted vandals sentenced to trash their own cars
  • Corrupt justice on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered to send a handwritten apology letter and a picture of herself in handcuffs to every judge in the state (in addition to fines, house arrest, and volunteer work) for using her judicial staff to help her campaign for reelection. The requirement to send the photo of her in handcuffs was removed on appeal as serving "no legitimate rehabilitative or corrective purpose", but the rest was upheld (including hand-writing every single one of the 500+ apology letters).
• Courts in Singapore are big on punishing criminals by embarrassing them. For example, they often sentence someone to community service, picking up trash while wearing a sign on his chest describing the crime he comitted. Considering Singapore's draconian laws against littering, picking up enough trash to fill the quota might...take a while. Not to mention that corporal punishment for some crimes is legal there (and the subject of controversy).
• Ever been to (or heard of) Arlington National Cemetery? That's one huge example of this trope. Union Quartermaster-General Montgomery C. Meigs was asked to find a new place to bury the Civil War dead. What did he do? He chose the house and property of the man he felt was responsible, Confederate General and Virginian Robert E. Lee. (We should note there was no shortage of bad blood between Meigs and Lee, as each regarded the other as a traitor: Meigs, a Georgian who remained loyal to the Union, saw Lee as a traitor for rebelling against his homeland, the United States, while Lee, a Virginian first and foremost, saw Meigs as a traitor for abandoning his homeland, the State of Georgia.) It gets even better though, when Meigs' son was killed in battle he buried him in Mrs. Lee's flower bed. Oh the delicious irony.
• The small town of Mason, Texas had a problem with the influx of prisoners to its tiny jail. The sheriff's solution? Deter re-offenders by painting the inside of the jail pink and forcing the prisoners to wear pink jumpsuits and making them eat bologna sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. (Apparently, it worked.)
• In Ohio, if one is convicted of a DUI, they're required to place bright yellow license plates with red lettering, known as "party plates", on their vehicle in order to drive. Not only is it embarrassing—and a reminder every time the offender looks at their car—but it's a proverbial red flag to other drivers: they know to be more cautious around that vehicle.
  • Gallagher used to have a joke like that, saying that drivers should carry toy guns that shoot suction cup darts for when they see another driver being a jerk; and that when a car gets four darts, the other drivers can pull him over and each take a tire.
• In Valley Falls, NY, a vandal who tore down and burned an American flag belonging to the local VFW post for refusing to serve him beer at their bar without ID was given a choice: either the VFW could call the cops and press vandalism charges (probably worth a couple weeks jail, since such a politically charged crime is guaranteed to earn its maximum allowable sentence), or he could accept being duct-taped to the flagpole for six hours while wearing a humiliating sign, or fight a veteran in a one-on-one battle. Needless to say, he picked Door #2.
• You also have some of the more minor ones that drive people insane. One shown by the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats is a flickering light. Lock someone in a room with it and most people will go insane, especially if it is at a slow random pace, like Chinese water torture. The playing of a kiddy song over and over was just plain cruel. An especially interesting one as well is not allowing someone to go into deep sleep, so even though they slip out of consciousness, when you wake them up to interrupt them they don't feel like they've slept at all. Although after a few days they start hallucinating and go batshit insane but it's better than some of the other ways.
  • The No Sleep one was used on Cersei Lannister in A Song of Ice and Fire to make them confess their sins. It worked.
• Two old men in Britain were convicted of making the lives of everyone nearby a misery with their endless feuding. The judge ordered them to be handcuffed together for 12 hours per day. They became fast friends, since the alternative was unthinkable.
• The above example may have been inspired by the two-man version of the shrew's fiddle called a "double fiddle", a torture device used in medieval Germany and Austria. If two people were arguing excessively over something trivial, a judge could order them both put in this device facing each other, forcing them to talk to each other (and likely be laughed at by everyone in the town) until the argument was resolved.
• Punishments involving music:
  • Hear a story once, where people were playing loud rap music in a dorm. It was keeping people in the next room awake, so what did they do? If you guessed blasted classical music through the walls back to them, then you're today's winner!
  • An issue of Nickelodeon Magazine had an article about a judge whose punishment for teens blasting rap music in public places was to put them in a room and force them to listen to Beethoven for several hours. (Maybe he was a fan of A Clockwork Orange.)
  • In a similar vein, there was a story about two students in a dorm who got into a loudness war with their sound systems. Every night, one would turn up his rock, the other would turn up his rap, until it was impossible to hear anything on the floor. It stopped when one student down the hall, sick of the noise, woke them up at 8AM with a 2-stroke chainsaw revving at full volume outside their doors.
  • The Monty Python song I Like Traffic Lights ^note Listen. If you can. has been used, on a repeating loop, for exactly the same reasons, as has Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive^note For those unfamiliar with the piece, it is an experimental work which consists of nearly ten minutes of a theme struggling to emerge, but not quite getting there - it's also notable for a disorienting Gratuitous Panning section in the stereo mix, where the music keeps jumping back and forth between the left and right speakers.
  • In 1989, a United States Delta Force team cornered Panama dictator Manuel Noriega in the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See, the diplomatic quarters of Vatican City. Since they couldn't go in and get him, they instead enacted a campaign of psychological warfare known as Operation Nifty Package, which including blaring loud rock music until the Papal ambassador convinced Noriega to surrender himself.
  • In the Ottoman-Saudi War, Abdullah bin Saud was forced to hear his victorious enemies play a flute before being beheaded. This is because he belonged to a fundamentalist Islamic sect that explicitly forbid listening to music, with such sentence being essentially torture for him.
• Military punishments:
  • There was a instructor in ROTC, a Captain, who would have a cadet stand at attention in the back of the room if he caught him nodding off. If the cadet STILL managed to nod off while at attention, the instructor would have them hold a chair over their head. (This is akin to proper military behavior. If someone is nodding off during a briefing it was perfectly understandable to get up from your seat and stand in the back.)
  • It only ever gets more creative when you get into the real military, where they're allowed to humiliate you on a grand scale in front of dozens if not hundreds of your peers. Picture things on the level of fraternity hazing, only it's not hazing because it's punishment rather than a membership requirement. Take for example, "The Dying Cockroach," in which the soldier being punished was forced to lie on their back while kicking and flailing their arms and yelling "I'm a dying cockroach!" until the punisher saw fit to let it end.
  • Another example: Leave your weapon unattended? Do a series of Iron Mikes to 'buy' it back. Fall asleep in a class session? Stand at the back of the room, holding a canteen, looking through the loop that holds the lid on (playing sniper it's called.) Get caught watching the TV in the mess-hall? You get put on your elbows and toes to 'watch TV', and occasionally change channels. Caught doing something in the chow line you aren't supposed to? Stand outside the line reciting EXACTLY what you did so that other recruits don't repeat the mistake. It's safe to say that since the days of a drill sergeant beating the snot out of you ended, it just encouraged them to get creative in HOW they punish you and your whole unit.
  • There is also MASH, which stands for Make A Sailor Hurt. They're not allowed to beat you, but they are allowed to make you exercise until you wish they were beating you. Called "Beasting" in the British Army, and every bit as horrible as the word implies.
  • An Air Force drill sergeant was once extremely pissed because his men failed an inspection. After spending a half hour loudly dressing them down, he announced that all that yelling had made him thirsty, and he wanted a refreshing beverage from the soda machine on the first floor. No, he was tired and didn't want to walk all the way down there. No, he didn't want someone to go get him a soda because he didn't know what he wanted and needed to look at all the choices. His solution? Ordering his men to go get the soda machine and bring it to him. An eight hundred pound soda machine. Up three flights of stairs. Once they did so, he bought his beverage, popped the tab, took a long drink, then ordered his men to put the soda machine back where they'd found it, and reminded them that there'd be another inspection tomorrow.
  • One recruit in basic training thought he was above his fellows because he was an eagle scout. The DS took him into the woods and had him construct a nest complete with "eggs" (large rocks) and sentenced him to hatch the eggs by sitting on them for a long time.
  • The Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst has a punishment called "Show-clean". This involves cleaning and polishing every issue item in your locker, arranging every item within the locker on the correct shelf or hook as per regulation, and then taking the whole thing to the guardhouse on a hand-truck for inspection. If a single item is out of place or showing even a speck of dirt, everything gets tipped out on the ground regardless of weather, and the hapless cadet officer is instructed to truck it all back to his quarters and do it all over again. And again. And again. Until the duty NCO is satisfied. As NCO instructors at Sandhurst are largely drawn from the Brigade of Guards, who have VERY high standards of presentation, this process may take some time.
  • Russian cadets are forced, if they're caught doing something forbidden or violate army rules, to carry around big wooden objects reminding of their misdeed. Here's a few examples.
• In Britain, a deathwish driver from Lincolnshire was forced to see the consequences of his driving by going to the accident and emergency department at the local hospital. Needless to say, this was An Aesop in itself on how not to drive.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger has gone on record as threatening his political opponents with having them watch his Red Sonja movie.
  • His weaponization of Jingle All the Way.
• On the last season of Celebrity Big Brother UK after he failed a task, Jonas Erik Altberg (Basshunter) and Lady Sovereign were forced to be stuck in a room listening to Jonas' song All I Ever Wanted on repeat for hours.
• Famous case from the 1980s: a notorious slumlord was sentenced to live in one of his own buildings. Yup, Joe Pesci's The Super was based on a true story.
• A Malaysian political aide tweeted defamatory comments about his friend's employer. They responded by suing him, and he was forced to apologize 100 times on Twitter.
• Man prefers jail over arguing with wife. Long story short, dude was sentenced to house arrest, pleaded to be put in jail. They denied the request, and sent him back to house arrest, thinking that arguing with the wife was more than enough punishment.
• A small example, but as punishment for stealing soap in the Mohave county the thief is forced to wash themselves with said soap until it is completely used up.
• The German author Hans Fallada remembers in his biographical work Damals bei uns daheim how he and his brother sneaked into the storage room and ate part of a Baumkuchen intended for a family celebration. The punishment: for quite a long while, they got (pieces of) the rest of the cake as school meals, until they couldn't stand the confectionary any more.
• The procedures for electing a new pope essentially come down to locking the cardinals into a room until they make a decision, and if that doesn't work, start restricting their food supply. Historically, this has included such things as removing the roof.
• A few instances of men having sex with goats in rural areas have been punished by forcing the suitor to pay a bride-price to the owner and formally get married to the subject of their affections.
• A documentary said that detainees in Guantanamo Bay were tortured by forcing them to listen to Sesame Street songs.
  • Listening to anything at the duration and volumes reported would cause sleep deprivation and other problems, though; the Sesame Street songs may have been good choices (they were certainly good choices if making people take the technique less seriously was the intention) but even a song you want to listen to isn't one you want forcibly played to you all night at unreasonable decibel levels.
• Davao City, Philippines vice mayor Rodrigo Duterte, — who was infamous for Flipping the Bird while defending his daughter, the mayor of same city, who punched a sheriff in 2011 — had a swindler eat the fake land titles the latter presented to informal settlers he duped.
  • Duterte is now the 2016 president-elect of the Philippines, running on a platform of being "tough on crime, lenient only to surrendering criminals." Judging by the type of punishments he inflicts, minor offenders are likely to do what he wants.
• One kid in the Netherlands thought it would be funny to hack his older brother's Facebook profile. The brother did think about doing the same to him in retaliation, but decided to take a somewhat more creative tack. He turned his brother's room into a little girl's room, complete with My Little Pony light switch, Justin Bieber posters, a set of girl's rollerblades, Twilight novels and a vibrator. He even replaced the carpet and the furniture! Then, a year later, he tilted his brother's room 90 degrees, while admitting that the brother hadn't even done anything bad this time.
  • To which the little brother retaliated by painting the older brother's car pink.
• After the warship Cheonan was sunk, South Korea blamed the North and counter-attacked... with Pop Music. It pissed off the "Dear Leader" enough that he vowed to destroy any speakers set up along the border.
• One of your mangaka missed a deadline? Confuse her readers by flipping a page of her story in retaliation!
• According to the AA, Thames Valley police have allowed primary schools to borrow their radar guns for use in classes. Children are allowed to stand at the school gate and point the gun at passing cars to measure their speed. Drivers caught speeding in this manner have been given two choices, either face prosecution as normal, since the gun records enough evidence, or attend the primary school to explain to a group of preteens why they were speeding. Most prefer to be prosecuted, even though it costs an average of £600 (US$1,000) in fines and insurance premiums.
  • Because of the effectiveness, more and more regions are setting up similar schemes.
• A family court in Argentina sentenced two divorcees who were using their children to put one over on each other to read The Little Prince to their children 'so that [the parents] learn to treat their children like persons'.
• The Ancient Greeks were in on this as well. During the Olympic Games, everyone hates cheaters, okay? The Ancient Greeks had only one punishment for cheaters. They were given a statue of their own in a specific hall that everyone went to and they all had to carve on the accompanying tablet what they had done to deserve it: "My name is XX and I cheated by..." In other words, cheaters were immortalized for everyone to come see and point and laugh at for the rest of eternity. Some people just had style, you know?
• Most companies who run MMORPGs have a simple solution to deal with players who cheat or exploit glitches, like botting, hacking, sharking, illegal downloading, exploiting glitches, or spamming - banning their accounts. However, some have thought up unique ways to punish cheaters:
  • As of August 2015, Everquest II unveiled a unique solution: the "prison server" of Drundar. As explained here, characters transferred to Drundar are isolated from characters belonging to rule-abiding players, and customer support is inaccessible there; players can use those characters to cheat all they want, because they're only cheating against other cheaters. (This doesn't ban the account, however; Daybreak Games maintains that, for now, this is an experiment.)
  • Titanfall has taken inspiration from Daybreak Games by creating a prison server of their own. Cheaters banished there can still use whatever hacked or sharked downloads they used, as their only opponents are other cheaters.
  • Marvel vs Capcom 3 also does something similar. In this game, if you disconnect before your fight is over, then you can avoid having a loss on your record. However, the devs thought of that too, and if your in-fight disconnect numbers got suspicious, you were sent to a special server that was entirely populated with people who did the same thing. If you try to weasel out of a loss, then they send you to a place where everyone else weasels you out of your wins.
  • Final Fantasy XIV as a special instance called "Mordion Gaol" where players were reported or observed breaking the TOS in-game are sent. In Mordion Gaol, players can't really do anything, they can't teleport out, and they can't contact anyone outside of the instance: all they can do is wait for a GM to approach them and explain what rule they broke and why they were placed in the gaol. In most cases, players agree to correct their behavior, and the GM sends the player back where they were before.
  • One famous example in Guild Wars 2 happened when a player was not just cheating, he was blatantly cheating. (As in, respawning all over the place where most players couldn’t and attacking with weapons he clearly wouldn’t have access to.) The devs shanghaied control of his character, unequipped all of his gear, then made the character climb to the top of the highest point of the game’s Hub Level and had him leap off in a very public suicide. (And they taped it for the whole game community to see.) Then they perma-banned the player and deleted his characters.
  • Grand Theft Auto online:
    • One time, some wise guys found a glitch that let them import overpowered cars into the game. When Rockstar Games found out, they put in a program that made these ill-gotten cars self-destruct when the player got in automatically killing him. For one day, the game world was lit up like the Fourth of July.
    • Grand Theft Auto also has a "prison server" like the ones mentioned above for bad sports. What makes them notable is that they also put everyone in said server in a dunce cap.
  • When Gears of War 2 started, some players found a way to unlock every Achievement at once. Didn’t last long. When the devs found out, every player who exploited the glitch found they had lost those achievements and had gained a new one – worth no Gs at all – called Cheater For Life.
  • Similarly, in both versions of Drakensang there were several Gotchas for people using a cracked version. In the first one, one city guard would not show up at her appointed place, trying to rescue a group member from jail landed the whole group in there (without a way out), and later in the game the characters would slow down more and more if a crack was detected. In the second one, instead of the group's healer being able to heal a group member who had been disabled in a fight, for someone using a crack, only a paid healer would be able to heal those characters. Unfortunately, occasionally, people who needed to use a virtual machine professionally were also detected as running a crack...
  • H1Z1 had something novel. After issuing over 24,000 bans to players who were exploiting purchased hacks and cheats, Daybreak's CEO made a statement saying banned players would be unbanned if they apologized publicly via YouTube and emailed him a link of it. While that seems like getting off easy (especially seeing as Daybreak had lost 500K in revenue) one could say that going on YouTube and admitting you were a thief is punishment enough.
  • In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a glitch lets a player make a lot of in-game currency by selling hides and pearls. An update didn't remove the glitch, but it did ensure that anyone who exploited it would eventually encounter a special NPC, a rather unfriendly tax man demanding it be paid back. That's right, CDPR forced cheaters to deal with the IRS.
  • In Fallout 76, cheaters were banned from their account, and would only be given their account back if they wrote a 500 word essay on "Why the use of third-party cheat software is detrimental to an online game community".
  • Black Desert Online didn't punish for cheating but did punish players for griefing roleplayers, who the developers were very protective of as the game is meant to be a life simulator. In one particular extreme example a serial RP griefer who preferred to gank them as soon as they left cities for any reason found himself face-to-face with an invincible game master playing as a Giant, who proceeded to read him the riot act, suplex him for several thousand times his HP, and banned him until he wrote a 5000 word essay on the forums about the positive influence roleplay has on a game's community. Said person was also (very publicly) named and shamed and banned permanently after a GM saw him skulking an in-game wake for a roleplayer who passed IRL.
  • After outcry regarding a 'slaver guild' tricking new players into becoming virtual slave labor, Elite Dangerous developer Frontier decided to solve the problem by 'sinking' (ie, deleting forever) the incredibly time/resource-intensive carriers of the players responsible and banning them from playing on the open-access server (that is, the slavers are now only able to play in solo or in private servers; otherwise, they will never see another human player again). End result: no more slaver guild, and no one stupid enough to try to fill their shoes.
  • When Dota 2 distributed gifts to players for their Festivus 2023 event, smurfers (players who create alt accounts or deliberately tank matches so they can play against lower-rated players), account sharers, and other toxic players received a lump of highly toxic coal; opening the gift would automatically trigger a ban. One player was live on stream when he opened the gift and received the ban.
  • Because of Roblox's iffy moderation, a lot of games use various systems to prevent cheaters from appearing in their experiences, with Rogue Lineage having a rather creative way to ban these cheaters: If they were caught cheating with an accurate report, they would be sent to RL St. Jail, a server that resembles a high-security prison, where players could serve their sentence displayed above. Talk about a literal prison server.
• Georgia's state law explicitly prohibits banishment from the entire state, but one can be banned from individual counties. One loophole that judges sometimes exploit is to have someone they don't want in the state anymore banned from every county in Georgia, save for one: Echols County, located along the Florida border. Because Echols is a poor region with very little in the way of legitimate employment, most convicts who are exiled to Echols County end up leaving the state altogether.
• Also, some video game companies thought up creative ways to punish players who pirated copies of their hottest games (this is sometimes preferable to simply making the game not work if its copy protection is broken, as making it harder to tell when the game's been successfully cracked means it takes longer to break the copy protection^note The idea is to slow them down, as most AAA titles make the majority of their sales in the first few months of release):
  • In Crysis, if you try to play a pirated copy, your gun shoots chickens that do no damage at all, and also slow the game down, making the game unwinnable unless you can somehow use your fists through the entire game.
  • The developers of Batman: Arkham Asylum realized the game would be a prime target, so they fixed it so that pirated copies had a serious Nerf on Batman's gliding ability, making it impossible to reach some key areas and frustrating the owners to no end. This caught at least one player who had posted a thread on the developers' official message board asking how to get past this exact problem, outing themselves as using a pirated copy; the developers simply replied that "it's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."
  • Pirated copies of Serious Sam 3 included a extra enemy that was literally invincible, an undead red scorpion man. Players on the forums pleading for tips on how to beat this thing (proving they had a pirated copy) sure made fools of themselves.
  • Know those scenes in The Sims 4 where your toon goes to the shower or toilet and his/her nudity is blurred out? Do it in an illegal version, and the blur never goes away. Ever.
  • Mirror's Edge may be all about fighting "the system", but the developers did not want players to do it. Anyone with a pirated copy would never make the first jump; trying would make Faith hesitate from fear, and if the player persisted, fall to her death.
  • Spyro: Year of the Dragon gives the owner of the pirated copy fair warning first; a fairy tells Spyro that the game may be pirated, and warns him not to proceed. If the player does anyway, if he reaches the Final Boss, the game shuts down right before the battle, deleting the save file.
  • Banjo-Kazooie had something similar. If you have an illegal copy, Grunty (who tends to troll the player a lot as it is) will eventually pop up and cackle, "Now I will erase your game pack, because you had the need to hack!" And this is a warning, because she doesn't do it until you actually try save the game. (Cruel, maybe, but she is evil.)
  • Game Dev Tycoon has one of the best ways to punish pirates, bar none. This game is all about designing and marketing video games. Play an illegal version of the game, and you'll go bankrupt when the game you design is pirated too much!
  • Michael Jackson: The Experience on the Nintendo DS assaults the player with vuvuzelas, drowning out the music. And to make matters worse, all the game controls become invisible, forcing the player to frantically search for the exit button to escape the incessant Sensory Abuse.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 will let you start the game and play as normal...for about 3 minutes, after that everything explodes. Command and Conquer: Generals will do the same thing, but after only 30 seconds.
  • Perhaps the cruelest punishment though came from EarthBound (1994); if your SNES detects you're playing a pirated copy, the amount of enemies dramatically increases, making the game much more difficult to get through. Let's say though you power through it and get to the final boss; if you get to that point, the game locks up and forces you to reset the system. When you boot it back up, your entire save file will have been erased.
• Have a teacher that also happens to be a sports coach, especially a particularly rough sport like American Football? Expect punishments to involve push-ups. Bonus points if the teacher tells the class to count and they decide to be uncooperative. ("1, 3, 2, 8, 5...")
• Michael Grade is the only controller of the BBC to not be knighted by Queen Elizabeth. It's rumored that the reason is that he hated and cancelled Doctor Who, of which Her Majesty was a huge fan.
  • He does, however, have a life peerage. Since 2011 he's officially known as Michael Ian Grade, Baron Grade of Yarmouth.
• In December 2018, a poacher by the name of David Berry Jr. was sentenced to watch the movie Bambi at least once a month for poaching deer over the course of nine years.
• One Belgian teacher's solution to students talking in class? Write spoilers from the as-yet unadapted A Song of Ice and Fire books on the blackboard.
• William Burke of the Burke and Hare Murders was on the receiving end of a brutally poetic example. After being convicted and sentenced to hang for murdering 14 individuals to sell to anatomy lecturer Robert Knox as anatomy specimens, the presiding judge made an additional stipulation regarding Burke's fate. His residency at the Edinburgh Medical School continues as of 2020.
  "Your body should be publicly dissected and anatomized. And I trust, that if it is ever customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order that posterity may keep in remembrance your atrocious crimes."
• Leicester judge Timothy Spencer sentenced a Neo-Nazi sympathiser convicted of planning to build bombs to read classic novels like Pride and Prejudice rather than extremist literature and come to court to be tested on them every four months, with the threat of being sent to jail if he didn't. His sentence was later changed to two years in prison after being judged too lenient.

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