A Montana judge’s 60-day sentencing of a man who admitted to “repeatedly” raping his 12-year-old daughter has caused outrage and has led to a petition calling for the judge’s impeachment.
The Washington Postreported that Judge John McKeon sentenced a Glasgow, Mont. man, whose identity the Post is withholding for the sake of the sexual assault survivor, to 60 days in jail instead of the 25 years prosecutors asked for. Prosecutors asked for a 100-year sentence, 75 years of which would be suspended. McKeon gave the man a 30-year suspended sentence, meaning he’ll only serve that time should he fail the terms of his probation.
The man has reportedly already served 17 days in jail. McKeon has counted those days toward the 60-day sentence, meaning the man only has 43 days left to serve. The Change.org petition calling for Judge McKeon’s impeachment has reached 29,000 signatures so far.
Defending his decision, McKeon wrote in an email to the Associated Press that there’s an exception in Montana law to the 25-year mandatory sentence for incest with a person younger than 12 years old. McKeon wrote that if psychosexual evaluation finds psychiatric treatment “affords a better opportunity for rehabilitation of the offender and for the ultimate protection of the victim and society,” the offender doesn’t have to go to prison.
Criticisms of McKeon’s light sentence in the case were made more glaring when The Courierreported that McKeon called the man’s probation conditions “quite restrictive.” The probation conditions include: registering as a sex offender, having limited access to the Internet, and having no access at all to pornography.
