A few years ago on David E. Kelley's The Practice, a man who had secretly videotaped an attractive young woman in her apartment shower (and then distributed the recording on the Net) was forced to pull down his pants in the courtroom. The judge, the court, and no doubt the audience, smirked.

Poetic justice may be fun in fiction; too bad we have to witness it in real life. Face it: gut appeal doesn't make it good.

It's not even the law.

The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is fairly clear on this: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

These rulings rub against the plain meaning of the last clause: no unusual punishment!

Some time back I castigated the Supreme Court for taking the "world standard" (chiefly, the consensus of states in Europe) regarding the death penalty as reason enough to rule against a particular use of capital punishment. Some of my readers wrote to disagree, saying that the "unusual punishment" prohibition suggested making a comparative standard. Plausible, but easy to deny. The obvious comparative is with other punishments in the United States, not the rest of the world. The standard is our own rule of law.

And focusing on humiliation . . . that's deliberate cruelty. Also forbidden.

The whole thing smacks of barbarity — even if ostensibly to defend kittens. "Creative sentencing" was once common; remember The Scarlet Letter? Making up new punishments for every even slightly odd case is precisely what the Founding Fathers worked against.

Why? Because we can't trust judges to make the law anew with each case. We cannot trust our lives to judges with that kind of power.

But I understand the appeal. It sure is tempting. For instance, I'd like to send Judge Cicconetti into the woods armed only with a flashlight — and a copy of the Constitution.