Former University of Pennsylvania professor Tracy McIntosh was sentenced this afternoon to 3-1/2 to seven years in prison for sexually assaulting a Penn graduate student.
This case is notable because he originally received some of that "special justice" reserved for very special white people.
In 2004, McIntosh pleaded no contest to sexual assault in an event that occurred in his Penn office two years earlier. Judge Rayford A. Means sentenced him to 11-1/2 to 23 months of house arrest, in part in consideration of his international reputation and research work.
District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham, however, appealed to state Superior Court, which vacated the sentence last April for being too lenient. But at the first resentencing hearing, on Sept. 7, Means disqualified himself because of the public controversy over his sentence. Dembe replaced him.