www.justiceforchandra.com

[gozgals]

I just heard the verdict and also read it too and I'm totally shocked and wigging out. How can this be? How can he only get 2nd degree murder for this horrid crime? This makes no sense to me. I hope that he receives life in prison once he is sentenced. Our justice system is getting worse by the year. I don't feel there was any justice for Tara with this verdict.

Happy Holidays

Goz


RD

[gozgals]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/02/21/wife.dismembered.ap/index.html


<snip>
MOUNT CLEMENS, Michigan (AP) -- A man who killed and dismembered his wife was sentenced Thursday to serve at least 50 years behind bars by a judge who called his actions "demonic."


Stephen Grant choked his wife to death and cut up her corpse.

Stephen Grant choked his wife, Tara, to death, then cut up her corpse in a machine shop. After the killing, he tearfully told reporters he wasn't involved in her disappearance.

"Stephen Grant is evil personified," Prosecutor Eric Smith said.

Grant, on the advice of his lawyer, did not speak during the sentencing.

A jury found him guilty in December of second-degree murder. Prosecutors had sought a first-degree murder conviction, but the jury could not unanimously agree that Grant's actions were premeditated.

The defense was seeking a sentence of 15 to 25 years. But Macomb County Circuit Judge Diane Druzinski agreed with the prosecution recommendation of a sentence of 50 to 80 years for the killing.

The judge called Grant's actions "demonic, manipulative, barbaric and dishonest." Grant also received six to 10 years for mutilating the body, to run concurrently with the longer sentence.

Grant, 38, showed little emotion during the hearing, although he looked troubled as Alicia Standerfer, Tara Grant's sister, described how the couple's two young children are struggling with the loss of their mother at the hands of their father.

"He's so much of a coward, he doesn't even look me in the eye in the courtroom," Standerfer said afterward.
<snip>

They got him down when they called him "demonic and a coward!"

Once again, the children are left struggling with the loss of both a mother and a father.