Next month, when District Judge Kitty Curtis re-sentences Joseph Aceto to prison, some discomfort in how the system works will be soothed.

Aceto and the bumpy road to justice

On May 4, a jury convicted Aceto of trying to kill a man he'd never met before and kidnapping a woman who was terrified of him after her brief romance with Aceto ended.

The trial was an exercise in frustration for prosecutors, who had secured a 210-year sentence for Aceto in 2002 only to see that verdict overturned by the state Supreme Court, which decided that Aceto had been denied his constitutional rights at his first trial.

The reason? Aceto acted as his own lawyer at that trial. He had questioned his own victim, Eileen Holmquist. He pestered and harassed her under the guise of cross-examination. Stymied by District Judge Ted Lympus' orders to stop, Aceto blew up. He flung profanities and a file towards Lympus and Holmquist as she cowered and cried on the witness stand.

When Lympus did what most any judge would do - banned Aceto from the courtroom - he caused such "grievous" damage to Aceto that a new trial was necessary, according to the Supreme Court. It was enough to shake a trial watcher's faith in the system to see Aceto rewarded for his own misbehavior.

County Attorney Ed Corrigan diligently prepared for a new trial for Aceto. He faced a daunting handicap, however. Holmquist had killed herself after Aceto's first trial. Corrigan's main witness was gone. The jury could be told only that Holmquist was "unavailable," as if the trial were not important enough for her to attend.

Nevertheless, Corrigan built a sturdy case. Some of the transcript from Holmquist's testimony at the first trial was admissible, and Rocky Hoerner returned to the courtroom to tell again the story of what happened to him that May night in 2000.

He and Holmquist had been working in his Columbia Falls art gallery, when she spotted Aceto cruising past. Hoerner walked to the corner of the block, unarmed, to ask Aceto why he was lurking there at midnight.

Aceto testified that this enraged him and that he wanted to punish and humiliate Hoerner, who fled back into his gallery when he saw the gun in Aceto's hand. Two bullets missed Hoerner, who frantically called police as Aceto set his sights on Holmquist. He fired more shots at a door that separated him from his prey. She opened the door and Aceto took her out into the night, away to the woods of the North Fork. He kept her there while a manhunt ensued. After 30 hours, he freed her and surrendered himself.

The jury evidently struggled with the question of whether Aceto intended to kill Holmquist when he shot into the door. They hung with a 6-6 vote on whether that constituted attempted deliberate homicide.

They agreed, though, on Aceto's intent to kill Hoerner. On his kidnapping of Holmquist. On the use of a weapon during the crimes. And on the fact that Aceto did not release Holmquist in a safe place. The latter two findings increase the penalty that Curtis can impose.

Aceto has a nefarious record of crime. He reportedly became a member of the Witness Protection Program after testifying against cohorts in bombings on the East Coast and he also killed a man in prison.

At his last trial, he was ably defended in court by attorneys Glen Neier and Ed Falla. He received all the protections afforded by law and he was rightly convicted.

The system worked and we like the sound of the words "last trial."