photo caption: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said he is frustrated with how the criminal justice system treats people with addictions or mental health issues

Excerpt:

As lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is a very busy man. But he was prepared to drop everything on Friday and drive to a Weis Markets in Lebanon, Pa., to hand deliver a personal check for $109.63, the exact sum of groceries that a woman with advanced cancer was recently convicted of stealing.

Last week, a judge sentenced the woman, Ashley Menser, to at least 10 months in prison — a punishment that Mr. Fetterman called overly harsh and emblematic of a flawed criminal justice system.

“In what universe do you deserve to be sent to prison for 10 months for stealing $110 worth of groceries?” he said in an interview on Friday.

Mr. Fetterman, a Democrat who was elected in 2018, said he was shocked when he read a news article in the PA Post, a statewide news site, about the case on Friday morning. “I could scarcely believe what I was reading,” he added. “This is just insane.”

Image​: Ashley Menser, seen here in a family photo, was recently told by a doctor that cancer “is eating you up inside, her mother said

Ms. Menser’s mother, Stephanie Bashore, said that her 36-year-old daughter has advanced uterine cancer, as well as cervical cancer, and needs surgery to remove her uterus and the tissue around it. On the day Ms. Menser was sentenced, her mother said, she had been scheduled to meet with her oncologist to discuss a last-ditch effort to treat the disease.

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Ms. Bashore said that her daughter had been working at a fast-food restaurant and had put many problems behind her [....]