If the punishment sounds disproportionate to the crime, it will sound that much more so when you consider that it took the jury all of five minutes to arrive at that sentence.
So why have twelve of 44-year-old Dana Brock’s Fort Worth peers condemned her to live out the remainder of her life in the pokey? Because, the Blaze reports via ABC affiliate KXAS, Brock has a lengthy criminal record.
According to Parker County district attorney Jeff Swain, her rap sheet is as long as Santa’s list of who’s naughty and who’s nice. The most recent theft, of power tools, was the last straw the under Texas’s “three strikes and you’re out” law.
Her previous misdeeds, which began early, are not limited to larceny. When she was 17 Brock was convicted in Arizona of solicitation to commit murder. Later she was convicted of credit card abuse, injury to a child, theft, assault, and drug possession.
In December 2012, Brock earned the dubious title Christmas “Grinch” after she was caught on surveillance video stealing Christmas lights from outside a home while the family slept inside. She was collared again in May for stealing a weed wacker and power washer from a garage. Again, her actions were dutifully by a surveillance camera.
The video of her stealing Christmas lights was played for the jury during the sentencing phase of her trial. Ordinarily, the charge of which was convicted — burglary of a habitation — would have netted her two to 20 years in the slammer. Instead, the judge through the proverbial book at her.
Her attorney, Raul Navarez, was as nonplused by the sentence as his client:
A 70-year sentence will knock the air out of your stomach. She kept asking me, ’70 years? Are you serious? 70 years?’ Because 70 years is a pretty harsh sentence for this kind of a deal. And quite frankly, that’s what I argued to the jury. But the jury decided and we have to respect that.
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