MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – Former Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy has praised Judge Edward Cashman as a “competent, caring and conservative trial judge.”

Amestoy, who stepped down as chief justice in 2004, wrote in an opinion piece for Vermont newspapers that “of all the waters a judge must navigate, sentencing is by far the most challenging.”

Amestoy is living in Germany while his wife, a teacher, is on sabbatical there. “From this distance it is difficult to assess the merits of Judge Cashman’s decision in the Hulett case, but I doubt it would be any easier to evaluate the appropriateness of the sentence, even if I had my former vantage point.

“It is easy to determine whether a sentence is popular or unpopular, but considerably more difficult to discern whether it is right’ or wrong,”‘ Amestoy wrote.

At issue is the sentence that Cashman gave Mark Hulett in a sexual abuse case. Critics say the sentence provides too little jail time to serve as adequate punishment. Cashman’s emphasis was on providing treatment for Hulett so that he would not be a repeat offender.

Amestoy, a Republican who served as attorney general from 1985 to his appointment in 1997 as chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, said that he had pushed unsuccessfully as attorney general for the Legislature to enact sentencing guidelines.

“Sentencing guidelines that preserve the discretion of the court to depart from the guidelines in appropriate cases – and provide the judge with the opportunity to explain his or her reasons for departure from the guidelines – would provide sentencing fairness, preserve judicial discretion, and contribute to greater public understanding of a court’s sentencing rationale,” he wrote.

“In the instant case, for example, such a sentencing guideline approach would have enabled Judge Cashman to place his reasoned explanation for the sentence on the record at the time of sentencing, rather than in response to a motion for sentence reconsideration and the swirling public criticism.”

Amestoy went on to say that while sentencing reforms are an important discussion, the issue at the heart of the Cashman controversy “is whether Vermonters value an independent judiciary.

“A judge who must first think of the popular response to his or her decision is not an independent judge,” wrote Amestoy.

“Judicial independence is a value easily honored in the abstract but more difficult to applaud when one disagrees with a decision. But, of course, it is then that it most needs to be sustained.”