20 December 2018 - Missouri Deer Poacher Sentenced to Watch Bambi Once a Month
Watch ‘Bambi’ Monthly in Jail, Judge Orders Man in Deer Poaching Case
Christine Hauser (The New York Times, 18/12/2018)
In the 1942 Disney movie “Bambi,” the little fawn is wobbling on stick-thin legs as it runs through the forest, urged on ahead of its mother after she hears a gunshot. Eventually, Bambi stops and turns around. “We made it!” Bambi says.
But the fawn is alone in the desolate landscape. Its mother has been felled by a hunter.
The tear-jerking power of the scene from the classic animated film, which has both touched and charmed children over the decades, went this month from screens to a Missouri courtroom, where it has become central to what officials are calling the largest case of deer poaching in the state.
Man Convicted of Poaching Ordered to Watch ‘Bambi’ Monthly While in Jail
Meilan Solly (Smithsonian Magazine, 19/12/2018)
Let the punishment fit the crime—or so the saying goes.
As Wes Johnson reports for The Springfield News-Leader, a Missouri judge has taken this old adage to the next level, ordering a convicted deer poacher to screen Bambi at least once a month over his one-year incarceration.
The defendant, David Berry Jr. of Brookline, Missouri, is one of four family members implicated in a three-year hunting operation that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of deer. According to prosecutor Don Trotter, the group mainly stalked prey at night, felling deer and removing their heads and antlers before abandoning the carcasses.
Yes, a deer poacher should watch Bambi. Films can transform us all
Ryan Gilbey (The Guardian, 19/12/2018)
“If there’s any test that can be applied to movies,” said the late Pauline Kael, film critic of the New Yorker, “it’s that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.”
But virtue is precisely what a US judge is hoping one movie in particular will instil in a Missouri miscreant. David Berry Jr was convicted along with other members of his family in a poaching case about the killing of hundreds of deer. Handing down a 12-month custodial sentence, Judge Robert George didn’t throw the book at Berry so much as the DVD: he attached an unusual addendum stipulating that the inmate should watch Disney’s tear-jerking 1942 masterpiece Bambi on a monthly basis throughout his prison time.
Thoughts of the aversion therapy undergone by Alex (Malcolm McDowell) in A Clockwork Orange spring to mind, though presumably Berry won’t be strapped to a chair with his eyelids prised open. On the contrary, I visualise it more as a comic moment in a Coen brothers movie: hardened cons in the communal TV room getting rowdy at first when the baseball game is switched off in favour of Bambi, before quickly succumbing to its melancholy power. They’d be in bits by the 40-minute mark.
Forced to watch Bambi and other unusual prison sentences
(BBC News, 18/12/2018)
A poacher has been sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to watch Disney's Bambi at least once a month.
David Berry Jr, who is from Missouri in the US, was convicted of illegally killing "hundreds" of deer.
It's not yet clear if the cartoon classic will have the desired effect on his rehabilitation - but it's not the first time an unusual prison sentence has been handed out.