Embarrassed and unbalanced when his wife, Lori, found out that he had not graduated from the University of Utah and had not been accepted to a medical school back East — and knowing his family and friends would also soon find out about his lies — Hacking shot his wife (who had told friends she was newly pregnant) late one night. The next day he told police she disappeared while jogging in a Salt Lake City canyon, when in fact he had put her body in a garbage sack and dumped it in a nearby Dumpster, which was emptied and its contents taken to the Salt Lake County landfill.

It took search teams months to find Lori Hacking's body at the garbage dump.

"There's a feeling that the actual sentence should reflect the current practice of the parole board," said Curtis, an attorney who has worked as a city prosecutor previously.

Only in very limited cases could a first-degree murderer get out of prison after five years under the current law, Curtis said. "But it could happen."

Citizens routinely get upset when they read or hear that a criminal is getting only a zero-to-five, 1-to-15-year or 5-to-life sentence for heart-wrenching crimes, Curtis said. "They say "one-to-15 years for a sex offender, you mean he gets only one year for a rape?" No, actually he serves much longer than that, but there are questions" by those who don't understand Utah's indeterminate sentencing system, he said.

Because the parole board still has the power of pardon, Boyden said, even with Curtis' bill, special circumstances would still allow a process to cut a prisoner lose from state control.

"Maybe he's convicted of a federal crime, and we want to let him go and let the feds pay to house him for the rest of his life," Boyden said. "Maybe he is injured and becomes a vegetable and it's easier to take care of him in a hospital. Those kinds of things could still be done" in the early years with a 15-to-life sentence.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com