We've previously discussed the cash-for-kids scandal, in which judges accepted per capita kickbacks for sending juveniles to detention. The WSJ blog reports a new allegation that one of the judges once decided the sentence for a juvenile by asking the accused how many birds he saw outside the window. "Six" was the answer and "six months" was the sentence. Bird divination was once an accepted mode of making some decisions in the time of Homer (see [68]), but the mind boggles at the possibility that former county judge Mark A.
Ciavarella used ornithomancy to send juveniles to detention.