Former Ohio judge Lance Mason is in custody today, accused of fatally stabbing his estranged wife Aisha Fraser. But if he’s ultimately found guilty of her tragic killing, the system he served as a judge and politician deserves accomplice status.

Judge Mason showed up on the Above the Law radar back in 2014 when he was arrested after an unhinged assault on his wife. He brutally beat and bit her while driving and then left her on the side of the road. At the time, we certainly expected the judge to be locked away and forced into the hole of permanent shunning that the details of that case would merit.

Instead, the system bent over backward to help out the judge who had previously served in both chambers of the state legislature. He was allowed to plead out to attempted felonious assault while Fraser underwent reconstructive surgery on her face to recover from a broken orbital bone. He managed to get out of prison in nine months. While he fought back against disbarment proceedings and then was restored to a mid-level management job working for the mayor of Cleveland on the taxpayers’ dime.

Should the criminal justice system lean away from draconian sentencing? Sure. Would society be better off if ex-convicts aren’t permanently blackballed from earning a living when attempting to reenter society? Of course. But we’re not talking about someone starting over after serving their time. This is a tale of complicity, where apologists pushed a professional colleague through his “difficulty” with sweetheart deals and patronage gigs. Protecting Fraser was never a consideration while they worked to restore Mason.

It’s not so much that Mason deserved harsher punishment — it’s that he deserved someone, somewhere along the line not telling him that his actions would have only the barest of consequences under the circumstances.

People apologize for abusers all the time. Whenever a woman is killed by someone close to them, it rarely comes out of the blue. Instead, there are a lot of observers who either avoided the signs or actively tried to “help” by making life as easy as possible for the abuser. In a twisted way, it’s fitting that this story comes to us out of Ohio, where their university spent the summer unraveling the Ohio State abuse scandal. The markers bear an uncomfortable similarity — with someone in a position to intervene convinced they’ve done their part by exhibiting vague “disapproval” while doing everything possible to help the abuser “stay on the right track” with few if any consequences. It’s where people on the outside of abuse find themselves all the time. And they deserve none of the sense of satisfaction they derive by pretending they’ve done anything.

The system looks out for its own. This time, that chumminess may have been fatal.

Ex-judge who brutally assaulted his wife in 2014 is arrested after she’s found dead [NBC]

Lance Mason’s hiring by Cleveland based on his qualifications, city insists [Cleveland.com]

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.