Judge draws outrage for man’s 60-day incest sentence
HELENA, Mont. — A judge’s decision not to order prison time for a Montana man who raped his 12-year-old daughter has sparked outrage from afar and calls closer to home to toughen the state’s law, which allows such lenience in certain circumstances.
Enacted in a wave of similar legislation around the country after the killing of a 9-year-old Florida girl in 2005, the Montana statute requires a minimum sentence of 25 years in prison for anyone convicted of rape, incest or sexual abuse of a child 12 or younger.
But unlike many of those other laws, Montana’s also allows judges to dole out far less severe punishment in a case where a court-appointed evaluator determines that ordering treatment outside prison “affords a better opportunity for rehabilitation of the offender and for the ultimate protection of the victim and society.”
District Judge John McKeon, who oversees a three-county area of eastern Montana, cited that exception this month when he gave the father a 30-year suspended sentence after his guilty plea to incest and ordered him to spend 60 days in jail over the next six months, giving him credit for the 17 days already served. His sentence requires him to undergo sex offender treatment and includes many other restrictions.
The Associated Press is not identifying the man to avoid identifying the victim of a sexual assault.
McKeon took the rare step of issuing a statement a day after news of the Oct. 4 sentencing was widely published. In that statement and in his sentencing order issued Monday, the judge listed the factors that weighed into sparing the man prison time, including that: An evaluator found the defendant could be treated and supervised in the community; the man did not have a felony record, had a job and community support; the victim’s mother and grandmother wrote letters to the court supporting communitybased treatment, saying it would keep the man in the lives of his two sons and offered the family the opportunity to heal; prosecutors did not challenge the results of the man’s psychosexual evaluation; there was a “lack of input directly from the victim” or from an advocate for the victim.
An online petition arguing McKeon should be impeached has gathered more than 82,000 signatures in just over a week.