PLANTATION - Jeremy Thomas, a 16-year-old from Coral Springs, was busted for underage smoking at the mall a few months ago.

On Friday, Broward County Court Judge Steven Shutter ruled those few puffs would cost Thomas 7 1/2 hours of community service or a $53 fine or a pint of blood.

Without hesitation, he walked to a van outside the West Regional Courthouse in Plantation and prepared to be stuck with a needle.

"I didn't want to pay the fine," Thomas said.

 Still, Shutter acknowledges that "people who haven't done it before think it sounds vampire-ish."

Not Andre Young, 18, a Lauderhill resident who made his third appearance in Shutter's Teen Smoking Court on Friday. Unlike his first two visits, when his mother volunteered to give blood in his stead, Young was on his own this time.

"She's given up on giving blood," said Young, who in January, at age 17, was caught by a police officer smoking outside a Publix. "Now I'll have to quit."

Shutter's donors account for just a fraction of the 238,000 people who give each year to the Community Blood Centers of South Florida. Still, the donations are critical to the blood bank's supply, said Michael Rogers, vice president of operations at the Lauderhill-based centers, which provide 85 percent of the blood, plasma and related products to hospitals from Palm Beach to Monroe counties.

The centers struggle to keep pace with the demand because of population growth and potential emergencies such as hurricanes. Blood products have a relatively limited shelf life.

"If these 300 people didn't donate, that would be 900 fewer people that could receive transfusions of plasma, platelets, among other materials," Rogers said. "If Shutter's program went away, we would have to struggle to make up those pints."

Stephen Baldini said he was just trying "to relax" when he was caught smoking in a hallway at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

On Friday, he again tried to relax, this time in a reclining chair as his veins pumped a crimson current into a tube.

"It's better this way," said Baldini, 16, of Parkland. "You can get it done right away instead of waiting to get your community service done."

The program was started in the mid-1980s after a defendant balked at the prospect of raking leaves and asked about donating blood instead.

"I said, 'Gee, what a good idea,'" Shutter said. "You are donating part of you, and that gesture deserves recognition."

So he arranged for offenders to give blood to reduce fines or community service hours from their sentences. First, they gave at local university blood drives, then in the mid-1990s through two Community Blood Centers vans parked outside the West Regional Courthouse every other month.

Shutter himself has donated blood for the past 30 years.

"I give blood, but I don't look," Shutter said. "It gives me the heebee-jeebees."

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