No more 5-to-life sentences for killers in Utah?

Shoot your pregnant wife in the head, stuff her in a garbage bag and dump her in the trash and you should get more than a 5-years-to- life sentence, powerful legislators believe.

It doesn't matter much that the reality of the current sentencing law is that you'll serve more than 20 years before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole lets you out. Utahns clearly hate the very phrase, "5-to-life."

And so legislators now intend to change the state's first-degree murder sentence -- in part because they don't want to hear voters' screams if there's another Mark and Lori Hacking tragedy.

House Speaker Greg Curtis, R-Sandy, is working with the Statewide Association of Prosecutors to change the current law to say a judge can sentence an egregious murderer to 15-years-to-life.

"The impetus for this change was the Mark Hacking case," said Curtis, who added that he has not spoken to the family of Lori Hacking about it. However, Lori's father, Eraldo Soares, discussed the issue earlier this month with the Utah Sentencing Commission, calling the sentencing nomenclature "horrible" and "insulting."

But beyond the Hacking case, Curtis said, it is always best to be clear with citizens what is to be expected in the criminal justice system; and Mark Hacking's sentence at trial is not reflective of what will really happen to him.

Paul Boyden, lobbyist for the prosecutors, said in reality nothing will change from current practice of keeping murderers in prison a long, long time -- except, he and others hope, public perception.

"No murderers were getting out after five years," said Boyden, a longtime prosecutor for the Salt Lake County Attorney's Office.

"And in fact, Mark Hacking got a 30-year rehearing" set by the parole board soon after being sent to the Utah State Prison, Boyden said. That means that Hacking won't even appear before the board for another hearing until 2035.

But when Hacking was formally sentenced under Utah's first- degree murder statutes to six-years-to-life (he got an extra year for using a firearm in commission of the crime), citizens who were shocked by the brutal nature of Hacking's crime started to scream. And lawmakers were listening.

Embarrassed and unbalanced when his wife, Lori, found out that he had not graduated from the University of Utah and had not been accepted to a medical school back East -- and knowing his family and friends would also soon find out about his lies -- Hacking shot his wife (who had told friends she was newly pregnant) late one night. The next day he told police she disappeared while jogging in a Salt Lake City canyon, when in fact he had put her body in a garbage sack and dumped it in a nearby Dumpster, which was emptied and its contents taken to the Salt Lake County landfill.

It took search teams months to find Lori Hacking's body at the garbage dump.

"There's a feeling that the actual sentence should reflect the current practice of the parole board," said Curtis, an attorney who has worked as a city prosecutor previously.

Only in very limited cases could a first-degree murderer get out of prison after five years under the current law, Curtis said. "But it could happen."

Citizens routinely get upset when they read or hear that a criminal is getting only a zero-to-five, 1-to-15-year or 5-to-life sentence for heart-wrenching crimes, Curtis said. "They say "one-to- 15 years for a sex offender, you mean he gets only one year for a rape?" No, actually he serves much longer than that, but there are questions" by those who don't understand Utah's indeterminate sentencing system, he said.

Because the parole board still has the power of pardon, Boyden said, even with Curtis' bill, special circumstances would still allow a process to cut a prisoner lose from state control.

"Maybe he's convicted of a federal crime, and we want to let him go and let the feds pay to house him for the rest of his life," Boyden said. "Maybe he is injured and becomes a vegetable and it's easier to take care of him in a hospital. Those kinds of things could still be done" in the early years with a 15-to-life sentence.

E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com

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