OPINION: Let's get tough on crime

Courts and communities need to get tougher on crime.

And my case, in which I was permanently blinded in one eye in an unprovoked assault in a Walmart parking lot in Missoula last year, is an example of a reasonably good start.

I had fully expected to write this commentary lambasting the judge for imposing a soft sentence on a criminal with a violent history and prior imprisonment for felony assault with a weapon. But I was pleasantly surprised when the judge on July 20 gave my assailant, Sean Lee Marceau, a tougher sentence than called for in a plea agreement.

The defendant got 20 years in prison with five years suspended, the same as what a pre-sentencing investigator had recommended and tougher than the plea agreement of 20 years with 10 years suspended.

I thought a good case could have been made for an even tougher sentence with no time suspended given the perpetrator’s prior record and the egregiousness of the crime — rupturing my right eyeball and blinding me, and the expected eventual loss of that eye because it is dead and shrinking. My good eye is also at risk for blindness due to a condition called sympathetic ophthalmia in which the body’s immune system attacks the uninjured eye after trauma to the other eye.

I’ve always been tough on crime. It’s not just since this assault on me last August.

People think that newspaper reporters, which I once was, are liberal on issues like crime. At the beginning of my journalism career — in Missoula actually — I covered the police beat and the courts. Reporters in those days in the 1960s were allowed to read police reports, conversed with prosecutors about cases and knew facts that juries often weren’t allowed to hear.

Once in Missoula, the local FBI agent, in the days when its director J. Edgar Hoover wanted publicity for the agency, phoned me at The Missoulian newspaper from the field after capturing some kidnappers and said he would be at the county jail in half an hour so I could get a photo. I got a picture of a handcuffed kidnapper throwing his shoe at me that went nationwide on the newswires.

Later, when I was a reporter in California for The Sacramento Bee newspaper, I got a rare interview with U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren when he was in our building to visit his old buddy, the editor of the paper. Some months later after I got a speeding ticket in the city, I went to the traffic court of Warren’s son, a local judge, to see if I could explain my way to a softer fine. I got the maximum, and it gave me a respect for the courts.

When I was a reporter in New York for The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s, I wrote a page one profile of an inmate on death row in Maryland, visiting him in prison and reconstructing the case. Some readers thought I was soft on crime because I wrote a profile of a prisoner on death row. In fact, I was just the opposite. I’m in favor of the death penalty and think it ought to be used more, and cases expedited.

So when Marceau’s sentencing was nearing, I was a bit apprehensive that the judge might go soft. Judge Robert Deschamps, a former county attorney, had lowered Marceau’s bail in December to $75,000 from $150,000, despite him having been a fugitive for two-and-a-half months after the assault, and thus a flight risk. He posted bond in February, but didn’t show up for his sentencing hearing on June 30. He was arrested a few days later and the judge set bail at a no-nonsense $250,000.

The press had recent articles of Judge Deschamps giving soft sentences to criminals in egregious cases. In one case this spring, Judge Deschamps suspended all but five years of a 20-year sentence for a man who sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl. In another, Deschamps last fall sentenced a man to probation for forcing his girlfriend to cut his name off her chest with a box cutter. News reports said the guy was back in jail within a month for stealing a TV, DVD player and other goods — from the same Walmart where I was assaulted.

Marceau had assaulted me in the parking lot after coming up behind me, putting my head in an arm lock and pounding my right eye several times while I was on my cell phone reporting a crime to police by his accomplices. He threw me to the ground hard (which caused other injuries to my hands, knee and elbow) after passersby came and fled in his car. I had come out of the Walmart — while in Montana in an attempt to possibly move back to my home state from California — and walked across the path of two other men who were pushing shopping carts at high speed in the parking lot. Police later told me the carts were filled with hundreds of dollars worth of stolen goods. One of the men stopped me and slugged me in the chest several times after I refused to shake hands with him because both were very drunk and I thought wanted to rob me.

The two were arrested nearby after they returned to the scene and one of them kicked me in the ribs when I was on the ground bleeding and then punched a man who was trying to help me. I was nearly 71 at the time and Marceau 30; the other two were 35 and 28. The whole incident including the shoplifting in the store was captured on Walmart surveillance videos and given to police. The store had no security guards and no one to monitor the videos in real time.

An emergency room doctor sewed up the cuts on my upper and lower eyelids with 13 stitches and cleaned up my other wounds. I had eye surgery the next day. The surgeon said the contents of my eye including the retina and gel had extruded due to the assault, that repair wasn’t possible and that all he was able to do was stuff the contents back into my eye. I was hospitalized for two days and recuperated in a cheap motel for four weeks. My surgeon referred me to the UCLA eye institute and I returned to California for exams there and at a Veterans Administration hospital in Loma Linda where I also get care. Doctors say my vision can’t be restored as my eye is dead now and shrinking and the completely-detached retina is folded over and a mass of scar tissue.

At first, I was very angry at being blinded and hoped Marceau would be found by police and killed in a shootout. Later, after he was arrested I hoped another prisoner would put one of his eyes, as in the biblical formula, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Eventually, I realized such thoughts weren’t good for me. So I started praying for Marceau in church, that he reform. I even felt sorry for him when I saw on his Facebook page his laments about his mother dying in 2014, but soon realized that even criminals can love their mothers and there is no recompense for that. It brought to mind what a Maryland judge said about the guy I wrote about on death row, that he was manipulative and would say anything to get out of prison.

I thought that Marceau needed to be made responsible for his actions and given a stiff sentence. He could kill the next person he assaults without provocation, I wrote the judge in a victim impact statement in late May.

A week before the June 30 initial sentencing date, a Missoula criminal justice employee, shaken and moved by my injuries, emailed me to say it is cases like mine that “take their toll” on her and make her even consider walking away from her law enforcement career for something more benign. Looking at my eye and face after the assault, even seemed to visibly upset some of the police officers and my eye surgeon. Police photos taken in the hospital emergency room of my damaged eye and cuts around it were much more grotesque than ones I had taken later by nurses after the surgery, stitches and cleanup, even though those were still gruesome.  

Marceau’s June sentencing hearing date was around the time of the search for two New York prison escapee murderers and got me thinking about society’s gradual softening of the death penalty, increased paroles and frequent probation instead of jail time.

In Missoula, a university town, courts have a reputation, fair or not, of being lax on crime, with too many criminals given suspended or soft sentences. Unfortunately, such sentencing is true throughout much of America. Marceau and others of his ilk need to be shown in sentencing that crime doesn’t pay. Missoula had one strict judge who was known for severe sentences. Unfortunately, he retired this spring.

Cases like mine or egregious ones nationally that I read about or see in the news make me almost yearn for the bygone days of Old West frontier justice. The last hanging in Montana, of all places, was in liberal Missoula in 1943. In my old hometown of Miles City there were hangings back in the 1930s. When I visited death row in Maryland in the 1970s, I saw the electric chair. A staffer said: “We fire it up once in a while” to make sure it works.

That sounds gruesome in the days when the U.S. Supreme Court debates whether lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. In my view, the death penalty needs to be applied fairly, but I don’t think our society is ready yet to outlaw it and a case could be made to increase its use for the worst crimes. And I think laws should be strengthened to give stricter prison sentences to hardened and violent criminals. But there should also be programs to treat violent children before they become criminals. One reason often given for easy sentences and probation is prison and jail overcrowding. Well, we need more jails and prisons for a growing U.S. population, as well as more and better treatment programs for criminals.

Since I grew up in Montana in the 1950s the state has grown and crime and violence have increased, from murders to robberies to assaults, even in tree-lined university towns like Missoula. It’s not a “Leave It to Beaver” type state anymore. The same day as the Marceau no-show in court on June 30, there were headlines on The Missoulian website about: a lawyer for a Billings woman’s killer doubting the convicted murderer would be executed; a Hamilton man getting a 60-year sentence for stomping a friend to death; sentencing delayed for a Bozeman coach who sexually assaulted a player; bail set for a man charged with attempted homicide at a Missoula motel; and a 33-year-old man charged with raping a teenage girl in a Great Falls motel.

People nationwide need to reclaim their cities from criminals and make communities safe again. It shouldn’t be unsafe to go to a Walmart or to a downtown at night. Security guards and more police would help. Police are sometimes frustrated by easy sentences of judges. A good start could be for courts to get tougher on crime and criminals. Soft on crime judges need to be voted out of office nationwide. Taxpayers shouldn’t be afraid to foot the bills for more jails. And we need to end the baloney like what recently happened re the prison escapees in Dannemora, N.Y., of coddling the murderers, giving them hotplates in cells, sex in closets with staff and hacksaws in frozen hamburger. In Missoula and elsewhere in Montana there needs to be an end to lowering the bail of repeat felony offenders like Marceau and giving too many criminals suspended sentences. It’s no different in California where I live or in any other state in the union.

I was glad that Judge Deschamps imposed a stronger sentence on Marceau than called for in the plea agreement. An even stricter sentence might have resulted in Marceau withdrawing his guilty plea and asking for a trial, something I had no problem with but judges and prosecutors like to clear the docket and can’t try every case.

Judge Deschamps viewed the Walmart surveillance video at the sentencing hearing, at which I testified from California by telephone, and said the assault on me was an “unprovoked, unjustified and vicious attack.” He called Marceau a “menace to society” who needed to be locked up. Prior to sentencing, Marceau apologized to me and to the court, but then added that “one bad punch” ruined his life. His attorney had asked that of the 20 year sentence 15 years be suspended. He didn’t get it. After the sentence, Marceau, no longer compliant and apologetic, kicked a chair and yelled   “f---ing liar” as he was being led from the court. The prosecutor told me it was unclear if he was referring to me or to the judge. One courtroom attendee thought Marceau said lawyer, not liar, and was referring to his own attorney.

I’m just glad Marceau is behind bars and not able to hurt anyone without provocation for a while, or even kill someone next time for doing something he disapproves of, such as reporting a crime to police. The Montana State corrections department website says Marceau’s numerous tattoos include prison bars and a gangster face with smoking gun.

His Facebook page continues to say he is “incognito” and “staying out of trouble.” I hope he stays out of trouble in prison and reforms. For that to happen he needs a change of attitude and behavior. The same goes for other criminals in Montana and nationwide.

Meanwhile, society needs to be protected from violent and repeat offenders.

© 2015, Les Gapay