Sex offender sees his sentence shortened

COLUMBIA -- A federal judge on Tuesday cut a prison sentence in half for a registered S.C. sex offender serving prison time on a federal gun charge.

Kenneth Glenn Hinson had been serving a 25-year sentence. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Terry Wooten resentenced the Darlington County man to just under 10 years in prison during a hearing in Florence, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Beth Drake.

Hinson was arrested in 2006 and charged with raping two teenage girls who said he dragged them from their beds to an underground room behind his home, then bound and left them for dead.

During a four-day manhunt, the state's top prosecutor - who eventually took on the case himself - said Hinson, already a registered sex offender, should have been committed to a state rehabilitation program for sexually violent predators after a previous attack.

In 2000, Hinson was released after serving nine years in prison for the rape of a 12-year-old girl.

Hinson's new case outraged the public and sparked a successful effort to pass a law that allows the death penalty for some repeat child molesters in South Carolina.

After a six-day trial in 2007, a jury acquitted Hinson, who testified he had consensual sex with both girls, who were 17, just hours before the alleged attack and built the bunker to hide drugs, not as a sex dungeon. His attorney picked apart the girls' stories and questioned why Hinson's fingerprints couldn't be found on the duct tape used to bind them.

Hinson won the case, but he never left the courtroom a free man. Moments after the jury's verdict, he was transferred into federal custody and charged as a felon in possession of a weapon for a 9mm handgun found on him when he was arrested.

A federal jury took minutes to convict Hinson on the weapons charge. Several months later, he received a 25-year sentence, which he has been serving at a federal prison in Pennsylvania.

In his appeal, Hinson argued that the sentencing judge should not have taken a 1989 cocaine trafficking conviction into account - a decision that meant Hinson faced 15 years to life in prison on the weapons charge, not the 10-year maximum he would have otherwise faced.

The appeals court agreed, writing in February that Hinson's drug conviction was not one that should have been considered a "serious drug offense."

In court filings leading up to Tuesday's hearing, his attorneys said Hinson should receive no more than six years. Hinson has already appealed the new sentence to the same court that threw out his original sentence, according to court papers filed Tuesday. Neither his attorney nor prosecutors immediately returned messages.