Judge Sentences Catholic to Attend Baptist Services

An interesting form of justice, to say the least:

Judge William Mallory enjoys handing out creative sentences from his bench over at the Hamilton County Courthouse. But the one he meted out in his Municipal Court room Wednesday wasn’t even his idea. And boy, oh boy did he like it. Instead of sending Jake Strotman to jail on a misdemeanor attempted assault conviction, Mallory sent the 23-year-old Catholic to a Baptist church for the next 12 Sundays. Before you go getting into a snit, you should know the sentence was Strotman’s idea. To understand how we got here, you have to rewind to Saturday night, Jan. 23, just after the Cincinnati Cyclones beat the Fort Wayne Komets down at U.S. Bank Arena. Strotman, a Downtown resident, had imbibed with his buddies at the hockey game and was in fine form when he approached a band of Baptist street preachers who were, as he puts it, condemning him. A curious and naturally jovial guy, Strotman said he “gave them my two-cents worth. “They were telling me I was going to hell,” Strotman said Thursday. “I was asking them: ‘Why do you think you can condemn people?’ I didn’t understand why they thought they could judge me.” Apparently, that was just enough for some other knucklehead to approach the church folks. This man, Strotman said, “started going off like a ball of fire.” There was screaming and words and threats before that guy broke a camera church members brought out in case of violence or altercations. The church folks threatened to make a citizen’s arrest. There was a push and a shove. And the fray was on. Strotman somehow ended up at the bottom of a pile and “was eating asphalt.” He pushed himself up with one hand and planted another hand square on the face near the bespectacled eye of Joshua Johnson, who had just been preaching the word of God. Johnson’s face was apparently cut by his glasses. Strotman was charged with low-level assault. Strotman said he never meant to hurt anyone. He just wanted to understand their ministry.

Read onto find out what happened in the courtroom.