The Bollard, a monthly newspaper published in Portland, has dubbed attempted murderer Leo R. Hylton, 34, Maine’s “foremost justice advocate” in an October issue alongside the question, “Who’s Afraid of Leo Hylton?”

Hylton (MDOC#70199) is currently housed in Maine State Prison, where he’s slated to remain until July 27, 2050, for robbery, burglary, and attempted murder.

Hylton was sentenced in Kennebec County Superior Court in Feb. 2010 after he was found guilty of participating in a brutal home invasion and violent attack targeting former Maine State Rep. William Guerrette and his ten-year-old daughter.

In May 2008, Hylton joined his foster brother, Daniel S. Fortune, in driving a stolen car to Guerrette’s home where they broke into the house with burglary on their minds. Both men came to the premeditated crime armed for violent confrontation: Fortune carried a “long knife,” while Hylton wielded a machete.

Due to earlier encounters with Fortune and Hylton, Guerrette had purchased a firearm and a security system. The security alarm awoke him to the break-in, but the firearm malfunctioned, which allowed Hylton to strike him several times with the machete, leaving him permanently disfigured.

That’s when Guerette’s ten-year-old daughter appeared at the top of the stairs, frozen in shock after having witnessed Hylton’s brutal assault on her father.

Here’s how Hylton’s actions after that point were described at Fortune’s trial:

“At this time, the ten-year-old daughter came out of her upstairs bedroom and looked over the railing to the first floor. Her father yelled at her to get back into her room. The girl saw a person come up the stairs toward her; that man, Hylton, “scaled the stairs as fast as [he] could” and struck at the younger daughter, who was “cowering against the wall,” at least four or five times as her father watched from below. Hylton later stated that the younger daughter was a witness and that he kept swinging at her even after she “[went] down” because he had to make sure there were no witnesses. The father tried to get to her, but Fortune was fighting him, “hitting” and “hacking” him, and knocking him down as the father slipped in his own blood. The father lost consciousness.

“As this was happening, the mother could hear horrible screaming. She tried the phone, but it was dead. She shut and locked the master bedroom door, ran into the bathroom and locked the door, pushed out the window screen, dropped to the ground, and started running. After she left the house, the mother heard someone kick in the bathroom door, so she ran through the woods to a neighboring house where the police were called. The older daughter, who had been sleeping in a bedroom in the lower level of the house, hid under her bed, eventually got her cell phone, and also called the police. The teenage son, who had been sleeping on the sofa in the game room in the main part of the lower level, started to go upstairs, but when the basement door slammed shut, he instead ran out the lower level doors and hid in the backyard.“

The first officers who responded to the scene of the crime believed that the ten-year-old girl Hylton struck with a machete four or five times was dead due to the extent of her injuries, according to court records.

According to subsequent press reports, the daughter required several major corrective surgeries related to the “devastating and disfiguring life-long injuries” Hylton inflicted on her with the machete strikes.

Hylton pleaded guilty to his role in the violent home invasion, receiving a 90-year sentence with 40 years suspended as part of a deal that allowed him to avoid a life sentence.

Under current Maine law, Hylton will not be eligible for release for another nine years — that is, roughly 25 years after he hacked up a cowering 10-year-old girl with a machete.

During his incarceration, Hylton has sought and obtained some college degrees, and he has formed an extremely close personal relationship with Colby College professor Catherine Besteman, with whom he has taught a course at the private liberal arts school.

Because he has behaved while incarcerated and has obtained some academic credentials, Hylton has become the poster child for left-wing criminal justice reformers.

In the most recent legislative cycle, there was a concerted push to bring parole back to Maine in a bid to allow prisoners to be released early into the community. Those efforts failed, in part because Gov. Janet Mills (D) and Republican lawmakers did not buy into the idea that attempted murderers who hack up cowering little girls with machetes deserve early release from prison.

Now, according to Bollard publisher Chris Busby, Hylton has penned a letter to Gov. Mills pleading for clemency.

Per Busby, Mills has “unfairly” rejected his plea to be released from the Maine State Prison in Warren. Here are some other ways Busby describes the circumstances of the 34-year-old man who attempted to hack an innocent 10-year-old girl to death:

• Hylton is introduced as a “restorative justice advocate and scholar caged in Maine State Prison”
• His clemency case is a “proverbial slam dunk”
• Mills has turned Hylton into a “political prisoner”
• The quest to free the guy who chopped a ten-year-old girls face up with a machete is a “human rights campaign for his freedom”
• Hylton deserves freedom, in part, because he once gave another prisoner a piece of advice

Busby also notes that District Attorney Natasha Irving, who is a notoriously soft-on-crime advocate for “restorative justice,” has backed Hylton’s release.

According to Irving, Hylton had just turned 18 at the time he hacked up the ten-year-old girl with a machete after attempting to murder her father during a home invasion. Because he was only 18, Irving reasons, the sentence he received was far too severe; plus, the 60-year sentence did not take into account that Hylton would go on to get a PhD. (Busby, like other writers who have taken up Hylton’s cause, never quite get around to explaining why earning a PhD means anything about anything.)

After a mere fifteen paragraphs praising Hylton and decrying anyone who does not support his release from prison, Busby finally gets around to mentioning Hylton’s victims, Rep. Guerette and his daughter.

Busby writes that Guerrette, a Republican, had recovered from Hylton’s “non-fatal offense” well enough to run for State Senate in 2020, as if his recovery in some way minimizes the heinousness of Hylton’s attempt to murder him.

The closest Busby gets to acknowledging that Hylton brutally disfigured a ten-year-old girl with a machete is when he notes, in passing, that she was “also seriously injured that night.”

Guerrette and his daughter to this day oppose Hylton’s early release from prison. But Busby makes the argument that actually what’s best for the Guerrettes is for Hylton to be released from prison immediately.

That’s because a newly freed Hylton would quickly start making all kinds of money on his Restorative Justice Speaking Tour ™ — money that he would then use to pay back Guerrette’s daughter for the childhood he stole.

Is Hylton a changed man? Who knows. Sure. Who cares.

But it’s quite telling that his staunchest advocates in the media consistently elide over the fact that he struck a ten-year-old girl in the face with a machete multiple times, a ravenous and inhumane assault that permanently robbed her of her life, her peace, and her childhood. Do a couple of PhDs pay back that debt? Will a couple thousand dollars to an “I’m Sorry I Tried to Murder You When You Were a Little Girl Fund” make it all OK?

If anyone has a right to answer those questions, it’s Hylton’s victims, the Guerrettes, and their answer is a resounding “No.” Reading some books, counseling fellow inmates, and being free to pay reparations might make Hylton feel better, but ameliorating the guilty consciences of attempted murderers is not the purpose of our criminal justice system.