Thoman sentence not the half of it

A far higher law than that for which Stacy Thoman was sentenced on Wednesday calls upon a mother to protect her children.

In a plea bargain, Thoman admitted to helping her husband molest their two young daughters over the course of several years while the family lived in Topaz Ranch Estates.

Father Kevan Thoman fancied himself quite the modern parent and blogged about raising his children on his own on a Web site that still comes up when his name is searched.

Before being sentenced in Reno to life in prison plus 20 years for molesting the girls, Kevan Thoman attended college and wrote about his life, omitting the more salacious details of his relationship with his daughters.

It wasn't until Stacy Thoman started divorce proceedings that the molestation, which lasted for years starting when the oldest child was 6 years old, that the issue came to light.

The girls are living with their grandmother and reportedly want no contact with their mother for obvious reasons.

We expect a mother to defend her children, and Stacy Thoman has no excuse for failing to protect her girls from a predatory father.

One reason she didn't face a longer sentence is that no one wanted to subject the daughters to even further exposure in a trial.

We've seen molestation cases in this country in which children were turned against the parents by poor interrogation techniques, where parents have been sentenced on multiple counts to decades in prison.

This is not one of those cases. Both the Thomans admitted what they did to their daughters. There was independent evidence confirming their activities. We feel the legal system was far more merciful in this case than it should have been. We have no sympathy for parents who would abuse their children in this manner because they deserve none.