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Calling it “one of the hardest sentences” he’s had to decide, a Dane County judge sentenced a Russian immigrant to probation for the stabbing death last summer of her husband at their rural DeForest farmhouse.

In nearly his last case, on his last afternoon as a Dane County judge, Circuit Judge David Flanagan sentenced Irina Kolenkina, 55, to seven years in prison, but suspended the sentence and ordered her instead to serve 10 years of probation, for the June 13, 2015, stabbing death of her husband, Vladimir Shevchuk, 52.

“You could have walked away,” Flanagan said. “It didn’t have to happen.”

But because he believed that Kolenkina had been honest with police about the incident, had no criminal record or bad behavior and had been subjected to ongoing abuse by Shevchuk, he said there was no need to protect the public from her that warranted locking her away.

Because she committed an “extraordinarily serious crime,” Flanagan agreed to impose the seven years of prison that prosecutors had sought, but suspended it.