Aceto sentenced to 220 years
By CHERY SABOL
Convict tells judge, 'I never stopped being defiant and I never will'
The Daily Inter Lake
Vowing to stay "defiant," Joseph Aceto was sentenced to 220 years in prison Thursday for attempted murder and aggravated kidnapping.
A Flathead County jury convicted Aceto in May after hearing evidence of his actions in 2000, when he shot at his former girlfriend, Eileen Holmquist, and her new friend, Rocky Hoerner, in Columbia Falls, and abducted Holmquist. He held her in the woods of the North Fork for more than a day before releasing her.
The jury could not reach a unanimous decision on whether Aceto attempted to kill Holmquist. It convicted him of kidnapping her and trying to kill Hoerner.
Aceto had been sentenced for the incident in 2002, but the Montana Supreme Court ordered a new trial. Holmquist killed herself that year after Aceto was sentenced to 210 years.
Sentencings are nothing new to Aceto, who before Thursday's decision had 21 felony convictions, according to District Judge Kitty Curtis.
She said Thursday that those crimes included assault with intent to kill and first-degree murder in events that happened out of state.
His criminal activity is "beyond anything I've dealt with in my 12 years on the bench … That's sort of a striking observation to me."
Aceto has said he plans to appeal his conviction.
In court Thursday, he said that reading his presentence investigation reminded him of his time confined at a boys training center in 1968 when he was 15.
"They weren't happy times," he said.
Then, authorities referred to his "defiant, destructive, belligerent attitudes."
Aceto told Curtis, "I never stopped being defiant and I never will … My standard is being defiant and hard."
Curtis said she agrees with that.
Maximum prison sentences are intended just for people like Aceto, she told him.
She followed County Attorney Ed Corrigan's recommendation and sentenced Aceto to 100 years for attempted homicide and 100 years for aggravated kidnapping.
Ten years was added to each sentence for the use of a weapon in the commission of the crimes.
Corrigan said Aceto should spend the rest of his life in prison.
"There is absolutely no way we can consider Mr. Aceto either a person who can be rehabilitated or a person who can be safely returned to society," Corrigan said.
But Aceto's attorney, Glen Neier, asked Curtis for a sentence so that Aceto "can have at least a light at the end of the tunnel."
Aceto, 52, is not healthy, Neier said, and "any sentence over 20 years is probably a death sentence."
As he left the courtroom, Aceto paraded a picture of an Aryan warrior in a Viking boat.
Asked later what it meant, he said the image is "a message to some of my comrades in prison."
It means "not to be soft on things," he said.
Aceto has said that he is not a racist, but in prison inmates stay "with people of your own kind … you have to."
Aceto said he likely will be taken back to the prison next week.
He has been incarcerated for almost all of his life.
His testimony reportedly led to convictions of people in the bombings of Central Maine Power Company's control center in Augusta, of a National Guard truck at a Dorchester armory in Massachusetts, an airliner at Logan International Airport and a Newburyport courthouse.
Aceto served less than two years in prison, then was placed in a federal witness protection program and given a new identity.
He was convicted later of killing a fellow prisoner in Arkansas.
When he was sentenced four years ago in Flathead County, he told District Judge Ted Lympus, "I don't give a damn about the penitentiary or how much time I get."
Reporter Chery Sabol may be reached at 758-4441 or by e-mail at csabol@dailyinterlake.com.