Pittsburgh- A Pennsylvania woman will face no jail time, despite being convicted of selling via the Internet criminally obscene stories about the rape, torture, and murder of children.

Karen Fletcher told a federal judge that she never intended to do anything illegal. She began writing graphic stories about violent sex crimes against fictional children in order to focus away from her the evil she had experienced as a child. But federal prosecutors see Fletcher as a pornographer, and a federal judge agreed — sort of.

U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti sentenced Fletcher to six months house arrest and five years probation after she pleaded guilty to six felony obscenity charges. Pat Trueman, special counsel to the Alliance Defense Fund and former chief obscenity prosecutor for the Justice Department, says the sentence in this case definitely does not fit the crime.

“Men would subscribe to her website and be, of course, motivated by the stories that she wrote,” Trueman explains. “And this is how sex crimes come about: People get ideas in their minds and they fuel them with stories and pictures, and then commit crimes.”

And while Fletcher argued that her tortured past and present condition as an agoraphobic should earn the court’s leniency, Trueman disagrees.

“This woman was responsible for the crime,” he points out. “It took a lot of effort to develop a website, to write these stories, [and] to seek money for these stories. She’s guilty. She had the mental state to commit the crime — she has the mental state to do the time. [T]he judge was just flat wrong in giving her a slap on the wrist for this.”

Trueman says he is saddest for the children who have probably been raped, tortured, and possibly even murdered by Fletcher’s customers trying to act out her stories.