Justice prevails!

Just got some good news from my friend Kit.  The asshat who tried to kill him last year got the maximum penalty the law allows in that state: 10 years.  He'd normally be eligible for parole in 5 years, but the judge added a caveat: Asshat will have to have earned the chance of parole by then.  If he doesn't, he'll spend the whole 10 years in a cell.

Ten years strikes me as a little lenient for what was clearly a premeditated act (based on both evidence and perp admission while in jail), but may be due to the fact that his victim was originally intended to be the young lady and not Kit, who happened to be in the way.

Now we're wondering what action the military will take against Asshat.  I'm told that anything from a full court-martial to a disciplinary dishonorable discharge is possible.  So that 10 years in state custody might well be followed up by time in a federal penitentiary.  One can only hope that they'll also give him more than just a token slap on the wrist*!

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* I'm not being facetious.  My father was in law enforcement for many years.  He was involved in one case where a woman was kidnapped, raped, sodomized, forced to commit oral sodomy, shot and left for dead - in the nude, in the dead of winter, in an unpopulated area.  Had she not managed to drag herself for quite a distance through the snow and underbrush, to where she could be seen from a nearby road, she would not have been found in time to survive and testify against her attacker.  

What kind of sentence did the county judge impose upon such a perpetrator?  He essentially slapped the bastard on the wrist and told him to not do it again!  Not surprising to those of us who lived in Redneck County - that judge had a reputation for being extremely lenient on rapists - but appalling nonetheless.

My hope is that there is an especially hot corner of Hell reserved for that particular judge.  (With any luck, he's already occupying it.)  He was one of those good ol' boys who'd opine that if a woman was raped, well, then, she must've been askin' for it.  (And from what I recall, had been known to issue such an opinion from the bench.)  

Oh, yeah, the cops hated that judge....