THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Still a key element in retail and now a prime element in the length of your sentence if you rape your daughter. One man in California gets 1503 years for his multiple rapes and another man in Montana gets 60 days for pleading to one count.

Several factors could explain the sentencing disparity between the two rape cases.

For one, the father from Glasgow in eastern Montana pleaded guilty to only one count of incest to receive a lighter sentence. Two other counts were dismissed as part of the plea deal.

Rene Lopez, of Fresno, was found guilty by a jury of 186 felony charges, including 22 counts of rape of a minor and 163 counts of rape. The trial lasted 11 days, court records show.

Lopez could have received a much lighter sentence.

Prosecutors offered him a plea deal twice, the Fresno Bee reported. The first offer could have secured him a prison sentence of 13 years, at most; the second, 22 years. But Lopez rejected both offers and chose to go to trial instead.

According to the Fresno Bee, Lopez raped his then-teenage daughter from May 2009 to May 2013. She was raped two to three times a week, on Christmas and other holidays.

In a statement explaining his decision, McKeon, the Montana judge, said the victim’s mother and grandmother wrote letters asking for the defendant to not be sent to prison, the Associated Press reported. While his actions were horrible, the man has two sons who love and need him, the women wrote.

Nobody spoke on the victim’s behalf, according to the AP.

In Montana, prosecutors did not challenge a psychosexual evaluation’s findings that the defendant could be safely treated and supervised in the community, the AP reported.

McKeon explained that although the plea agreement recommended a sentence of 25 years, it also provided for a lesser sentence depending on the results of the psychosexual evaluation. Under Montana state law, defendants may not face the mandatory 25-year prison sentence for incest involving children age 12 and younger if an evaluation finds that they can be rehabilitated.

Montana’s sentencing policies “encourage and provide opportunities for an offender’s self-improvement, rehabilitation and reintegration back into a community,” McKeon wrote in his statement, according to the AP.

A clinical social worker also testified that the defendant is not likely to commit a similar crime if properly treated. Public defender Casey Moore said the man is remorseful and has cooperated with law enforcement,

What kind of a horrid family life did the victim have when neither her mother nor her grandmother said anything on her behalf but stood up for the rapist instead? And what difference does his remorse and his psych exam matter if he serves no significant time for it? Location, location, location.