WOMAN SENTENCED TO NIGHT IN WOODS

Her crime? Abandoning kittens in two Ohio parks.

Michelle Murray is 26 and clearly clueless. She told a reporter that someone abandoned the kittens at her door. The shelter wouldn't take them. So Murray said she took them to two city parks and dumped them "to force the humane society to do something."

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:

Municipal Judge Michael Cicconetti said Lake Metroparks rangers will take the 26-year-old Painesville Township woman into the forest at dusk Wednesday and pick her up at dawn on Thanksgiving Day.

Rangers also will monitor Murray to make sure she is safe and does not freeze. The National Weather Service forecast for next Wednesday night is for a chance of snow with a low of 23 degrees.

"At least she gets the choice to bundle up for the night," Cicconetti said in a Thursday interview. "The animals she left never had that choice."

Murray pleaded guilty last month to a misdemeanor charge of abandoning animals after identification collars on the kittens led investigators back to her. The kittens, some as young as 4 weeks, were found by hikers in mid-September in Mason's Landing in Leroy Township and Indian Point Park in Perry Township.

Nine later died or were euthanized because they couldn't be saved.

The judge gave Murray a choice of a night in the woods or three months in the hoosegow. He also told her she can never own pets.

Murray finished with a whine: "[I]t's inhumane for the judge to send me out in the cold with nothing but the clothes on my back." Fine. She should leave the clothes behind.