Child rapist gets 60 days

No, that is not a misprint. Not 60 years or even 60 months, but 60 days. All because a judge no longer "believes in" punishment.

Mark Hulett repeatedly raped a young girl for four years; from the time she was seven until she was 10. He was convicted of this heinous crime. The prosecution sought eight to 20 years in prison. The judge decided that 60 days was appropriate for the crime.

Judge Edward Cashman found the time after his lenient sentence to lecture those in attendance, mostly those related to the young victim. He told them, "The one message I want to get through is that anger doesn't solve anything. It just corrodes your soul."

He explained why he no longer supports punishment, but is more concerned with rehabilitation. "I discovered it [punishment] accomplishes nothing of value; it doesn't make anything better; it costs us a lot of money; we create a lot of expectation, and we feed on anger," said the Vermont judge.

Cashman apparently did not anticipate that his ruling would also provoke the thing he said he was trying to avoid - anger.

The sentence outraged the victim's family who asked not to be identified.

"I don't like it," the victim's mother, in tears, told Channel 3. "He should pay for what he did to my baby and stop it here. She's not even home with me and he can be home for all this time, and do what he did in my house," she added.

And thanks to Cashman, Hulett will be home by the beginning of March.