SEX OFFENDER WINS NEW SENTENCING ON GUN CHARGE

Aiken Standard/Meg Kinnard
2/3/10
Three years after Kenneth Glenn Hinson's acquittal on rape charges, the registered sexoffender in South Carolina this week won a new sentencing hearing on a federal gun charge. Authorities found a 9mm handgun on Hinson when they arrested him in 2006.  Two teenage girlshad said Hinson, their neighbor, kidnapped them from their homes, bound and raped them in anunderground room behind his home and left them for dead.  After a six-day trial in 2007, ajury acquitted Hinson, who testified he had consensual sex with both girls just hours before thealleged attack and built the bunker to hide drugs, not as a sex dungeon.  Moments after thejury verdict, he was transferred into federal custody and charged as a felon in possession of aweapon.  Later that year, a federal jury took only five minutes to convict Hinson on theweapons charge.  He received a 25-year sentence, which he has been serving at a federal prisonin Pennsylvania.  Hinson has two other convictions – in 1983, for aggravated assault,and 1991, for raping a 12 year old girl. 
Hinson's appeal centers on whether the sentencing judge should have taken a 1989 cocainetrafficking conviction into account.   
(Columbia)