New penalty for sex-felon ex-prof

Former Penn professor Tracy McIntosh may be headed to prison after all.

The Pennsylvania Superior Court ordered on Monday that McIntosh be resentenced for his sexual-assault conviction..

The decision to resentence was in response to an appeal by the district attorney's office that McIntosh's sentence had been excessively lenient.

The former star neurosurgery professor pleaded no contest in 2004 to charges that he sexually assaulted the niece of a close friend in his campus office. His sentence included no jail time.

Instead, Judge Rayford Means sentenced him to 11 to 23 months of house arrest and eight years of probation. He served less than a year of that sentence before he was allowed to travel to Italy for a job there. His prospective Italian employer quickly fired McIntosh after learning of his conviction.

In the majority opinion handed down by Superior Court Judge Debra Todd this week, the court upheld the district attorney's appeal and ordered that McIntosh's original sentence be revoked and that a new judge oversee the sentencing.

"We find that the tenor of the sentencing hearing as a whole reveals that the sentencing court treated McIntosh, who was 52 years of age, less as a criminal than as a school boy requiring direction and supervision," Todd wrote in the majority opinion.

Assistant District Attorney Chris Mallios said standard sentencing guidelines for sexual assault call for a three-year prison sentence, though his office had argued that McIntosh should receive the maximum sentence of 5 1/2 to 11 years.

"We appealed to the Superior Court that Judge Means had abused his discretion," Mallios said.

Todd's opinion shows a clear agreement with this argument.

"We find the sentencing court's reasoning erroneous, and its sentence, constituting a severe downward departure from the sentencing guidelines, unreasonable," Todd wrote.

McIntosh has 30 days to appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which can decide to hear the case or send it back to the common-pleas court, where the Superior Court decision will stand.

Thomas Bergstrom, McIntosh's lawyer, could not be reached for comment about whether or not his client plans to appeal.

Cathie Abookire, the spokeswoman for the district attorney's office, said the light sentence originally given to McIntosh affects the victim more than anyone.

"The victim really pays the price," Abookire said. "She got victimized in the courtroom by the judge who thought that this person was too important to go to jail."

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