Child Molesting Teacher Serves Only 4 of 10-Year Sentence

(Talladega County, Alabama) This story should frost some cookies.

From DailyHome.com:

Linda Dingler, 49, was a teacher at Lincoln High School in 1999 and had at that time been carrying on a sexual relationship with a student who was 13 or 14 years old.

In November of that year, she was arrested and indicted on three counts of sodomy in the second degree and one count each of soliciting the student over the Internet and transmission of obscene material to a minor, all of which are class B felonies. In June 2001, she accepted a plea agreement and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

She will be released next month, not on parole or probation, but what the state Department of Corrections refers to as EOS, for end of sentence.

One source indicates that Dingler was originally sentenced to ten years for one count of transferring obscene material to a child by computer, ten years for one count of soliciting a child by computer, and ten years for second-degree sodomy. So, her convictions resulted in three 10-year sentences, all to run concurrently. Yet, through some type of administrative loophole and without a parole hearing, Dingler, a teacher convicted of child molestation, will get out of prison next month after serving a mere four years.

The scheme that allows her release is a program where an inmate gets two and one-half days knocked off a sentence for every day of good behavior. This means that all sentences in actuality become 40 percent of the time specified by the court. Five years become two and 25 years means only ten. I wonder if the juries know this tidbit of penal trivia.

The victim's parents are outraged. They accepted the provisions of the plea agreement with the understanding that Dingler would serve a minimum of eight years. Compounding that, they didn't even have a chance to protest since there was no parole hearing. I understand their anger. Just reading about the case frosts my cookies.