And while we are on the topic of offensively lenient sentences to horrible and dangerous criminals:

“The Flaying of Marsyas” by Titian

In Michigan, St. Clair County Judge Daniel Kelly sentenced Sara Ylen to at least five years in prison Friday for falsely accusing two men of rape. She’s a vicious serial liar: a few days earlier, she pleaded no contest to a cancer scam in a separate case.

Thirty-eight-year-old Ylen had accused a construction company owner and a mental health worker of invading her home and raping her after she drove her children to school in 2012. To help frame them, she went to the extreme of  using makeup to create what looked like bruises and carving an epithet in her arm. They would have been charged, too, except that both men had airtight alibis.  While working to ruin the lives of the innocent pair (they went to the same church as her ex-husband), Ylen also accepted thousands of dollars from supporters while claiming to have end-stage cervical cancer that had spread throughout her body.

At trial her attorney, David Heyboer, argued (zealously, as is his duty) that she was obviously disturbed, and that a single year in the local jail was sufficient punishment, even though this was her second set of false rape accusations. He made this argument without laughing, too. That’s a professional. Continue reading →