Judge orders Utah mom to chop off daughter’s ponytail in courtroom

It has been said that the punishment should fit the crime – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, etc. A Utah judge took that idea to its logical conclusion last month, when he sentenced a young girl to have her hair cut in court.

The judge,Â District Juvenile Judge Scott Johansen, Â gave Valerie Bruno the option to either cut off her daughter Kaytlen Lopan’s long hair “right now” with courtroom scissors or have the teen spend an extra 150 hours in detention as punishment for hacking off the locks of a 3-year-old girl she befriended in a McDonald’s. Judge Johansen had previously sentenced another girl involved in the incident, aged 11, to have her hair cut short as well.

Not surprisingly, Bruno was upset at the judge’s ruling, and filed a complaint against him shortly after the decision was handed down.Â “She definitely needed to be punished for what had happened,” she told the Deseret News. “But I never dreamt it would be that much of a punishment.”

Personally, while we feel that the judge’s methods were unorthodox, we think he was too lenient. He should have punished the mother as well. Give her a nice haircut to match her daughter’s, for example, or serve her with a more serious punishment – no iPhone or Starbucks for a month. That would show her…