Former Penn professor Tracy McIntosh may appeal a judge's decision that he be resentenced for his sexual-assault conviction, his lawyer says.
McIntosh was sentenced to 11 to 23 months of house arrest and eight years of probation. He pleaded no contest to charges that he assaulted the niece of his old college roommate in his Hayden Hall office after a night of bar-hopping around University City in 2003.
The District Attorney's Office has successfully appealed the sentence, however, and McIntosh will be resentenced by another judge unless he files an appeal within 30 days.
Thomas Bergstrom, McIntosh's attorney, agreed that the DA's request for a resentencing was a "fairly unusual case" but added that he is still considering whether to appeal the decision.
Experts agree that the efforts to resentence McIntosh last year are unusual.
According to Philadelphia criminal attorney Patrick Artur, it is uncommon for the district attorney to appeal to the Superior Court for a harsher sentence after winning a case.
Normally, "the defendant has the judge reconsider," Artur said. "In this case, the defendant was perfectly happy with his sentence, and the district attorney wasn't."
Artur said he expects that if a new sentence is handed down, McIntosh will receive some jail time.
McIntosh submitted his resignation to Penn shortly after his no-contest plea.
McIntosh's case has brought to the forefront the ways in which judges use sentencing guidelines when making rulings in criminal cases.
Cathy Abookire, a spokeswoman for District Attorney Lynne Abraham, said that "nobody is too important for jail," and that she feels "gratified" by the Superior Court's decision to send McIntosh's case back for resentencing.
Chris Mallios, the assistant district attorney at the time of McIntosh's release, said in March that sentencing guidelines dictated a minimum of four to six years of jail time for an offense like McIntosh's. Even a mitigated sentence - taking into account the value of McIntosh's work in neurosurgery - should have led to two to three years of jail time, Mallios said.
Artur said that there was no mandatory minimum sentence that Judge Rayford Means had to follow in deciding McIntosh's punishment, and that the guidelines were in fact only a recommendation.
Bergstrom said he and his client have a 30-day period in which to decide whether to file a petition with the state Supreme Court to prevent resentencing.
