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With good-time credit and an appellate court order, a former youth pastor convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting young boys in his care will be out of prison shortly.
The former youth pastor at Good Shepherd United Brethren Church in Huntington, Mark Kline, 44, pleaded guilty in 1997 to 22 charges, including child molesting. Some of the assaults occurred at an apartment on church property where Kline lived. He admitted befriending boys, drugging them and performing sex acts on them without their knowledge on numerous occasions between 1993 and 1997.
As part of a plea agreement, Kline was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
But the 28-year sentence came only after then-Huntington Circuit Judge Mark McIntosh accepted an initial plea agreement that called for 20 years and then changed his mind. Attorneys brought back a new plea agreement that called for tougher sentence.
Earlier this year, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled McIntosh was bound by the terms of the earlier plea agreement, which he had accepted, and ordered new Circuit Judge Thomas Hakes to resentence Kline, this time to the 20 years.
Because of good-time credit earned under the rules of the Indiana Department of Correction, Kline’s projected release date of 2011 fell back, and he is eligible for release now.
Hakes changed Kline’s sentence Monday and ordered him sent back to the Department of Correction, from which he will be released.
The new sentence does not sit well with the county prosecutors, both current and former, who deal with such cases and the victims left in their wake.
“I don’t like the outcome, but I don’t have the power to change it,” Huntington County Prosecutor Amy Richison said. “I feel bad for the victims’ families. This is getting dredged up again.”
Her predecessor, John Branham, said the initial 20 years called for in the first plea agreement was a significant sentence.
But he remembers a case made difficult by victims who were either asleep or drugged into oblivion, unable to recall what had happened to them.
Much of what they had to go on at the time was Kline’s own confession, Branham said.
“The problem is that you have to establish a crime occurred before you can use a confession,” he said.
And one or more of the victims were foreign exchange students who left for their home countries before the case was prosecuted, Branham said.
Richison is particularly frustrated by the good-time jail credit, which allows an inmate to have one day cut off his sentence for every day served without violating prison rules. Additional time can be cut if a prisoner completes educational programs, substance abuse counseling and other programs.
“We fight the good fight for victims in our community, and the victims get half the justice they deserve because of the credit time,” she said.
rgreen@jg.net
