In 2015, Billingsley was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with 16 years suspended, after he pleaded guilty to a first-degree sex offense, court records show.
The Maryland sex offender registry shows he was released from prison in October. The registry classified him in “tier 3,” which includes the most serious charges and requires offenders to register for life.
The full 30. This woman would still be alive if he’d been kept behind bars. How he worked it out to serve only 7 should be going into a lawsuit, which unfortunately won’t bring this woman back but might send a message to prosecutors and prevent future tragedies.
This woman, yes, but him serving another 23 years could have just been delaying it happening to another woman in 23 years’ time.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the key point here is that prisons should be about rehabilitating prisoners so that they’re fit to return to society. Just locking someone away for 30 years and assuming they’ll come out reformed is flawed thinking; the prison system needs to actively work towards making sure prisoners are safe to release into society and equipped to deal with society. And if one of those things isn’t true, the prisoner should not be released.
In this instance, it’s clear 7 years wasn’t long enough either way. But I doubt 30 years would have been enough either with the current attitude of prisons being for punishment rather than rehabilitation.
That might be your key point, mine is the prosecutor didn’t do their job.
What did the prosecutor do wrong? They proved that he was a violent criminal and a danger to society. The original sentencing would have him in jail until at least 2029 (if he did not fuck up, reoffend in prison, and serve the full 30) and put him on the sex offender registry (which worked as well as expected).
It was a judge that chose to suspend part of the original sentence. It was a prison system that failed to rehabilitate him. It was a parole board that decided that time served was long enough.
A lot of people (and a lot of systems) fucked up to let a violent individual roam the streets, but I feel like the prosecutor did their job to the best extent that could be expected.
