David Malakoff, the former NPR editor and reporter who pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography, has been let off without prison time by a federal judge. Bill O'Reilly, call your office.

Malakoff pleaded guilty to downloading and watching videos of children being raped. According to court documents, "at least 150 images of child pornography" were found on his computer last year by an NPR tech support worker after Malakoff complained that his laptop had been infected with a virus.

Yesterday, according to the Washington Examiner, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle—ignoring federal sentencing guidelines that recommended six to eight years in prison for his offense—sentenced Malakoff to five years' probation, a $5,000 fine, and 600 hours of community service. He must also register as a sex offender.

Huvelle's reasoning, as reported by the Examiner, was that Malakoff had already suffered enough:

In explaining the exceptional step of sentencing below the guidelines, the judge said Malakoff had already thrown away a successful career and has to live with the stigma of being a sex offender for most of the rest of his life. But the strongest argument for the lesser sentence, Huvelle said, was that Malakoff had been raped as a 9-year-old boy and he had looked at the child pornography over five hours last year to relive his own rape.

How ugly and painful and sad. The victim-becomes-victimizer dynamic of sexual abuse is complicated and horrible to contemplate, but—the justice or lack thereof of Huvelle's mercy notwithstanding—we're confident that O'Reilly will gloss over the nuance when he goes batshit over the confluence of NPR, child pornography, and a lenient judge.