Crimes Below the Belt II: Beheaded
The Long and the Short of It
Reeves, Sciara and Mendez, who had all pleaded guilty to the charges against them, finally went before a judge on March 15, 2007. After a brief two and a half hours, the court ruled that Sciara, who had already spent 350 days behind bars, be sentenced to one year in jail and three and a half years supervised probation under house arrest. Judge Dennis Winner took into account the time already served, ruling that Sciara had to remained jailed for only an additional two weeks for illegally performing the six castrations.
Michael Mendez, Sciara's sexual partner of twenty years, was released upon receiving a sentence of four months in jail which his imprisonment before trial had already exceeded. Like Sciara, he was also put on supervised probation for three years. Danny Reeves, Sciara and Mendez's alleged slave, received a sentence of eight months in jail, which he too had already exeeded in his year-long imprisonment. Thus, he too was able to walk free.
The men's potential sentences had been drastically diminished when "the state dropped its charge of practicing medicine without a license," in exchange for guilty pleas on the other charges, Jon Ostendorff reported for Asheville Citizen-Times.com. However, the men were "prohibited from performing surgeries or possessing surgical equipment during their probation," it was reported. According to Judge Winner, the type of perversion the men exhibited could "not be tolerated by society."