Shortly after the beating death of Sean Conroy in 2008, there was another, slightly less publicized attack.

A week after the murder of Conroy, 36, a Starbucks manager, another group of five teens was arrested in the assault of a 23-year-old woman near the concourse of the Eighth Street station on the Market-Frankford El.

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The victim, 23-year-old Tyesha Tazwell, was injured but survived. And Stanley Poland, convicted of punching her several times in the face, was sentenced by a Philadelphia judge yesterday to 111/2 to 23 months of house arrest.

The judge decided to be lenient on Poland because he had no adult record, a 3.9 GPA, was a valedictorian, had several scholarships, and was entering premed studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

While I feel the system worked here, this is still a random act of violence. Normal, stable people don’t commit random acts of violence like this.

If you scroll through the comments on Philly.com you will find calls for kicking him out of college, locking him up and throwing away the key, etc. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be a good solution. Destroying an 18 year-old’s life when he has no previous record will likely doom him to a life of even more crime and trap him in the system eternally. I wouldn’t, however, simply impose house arrest. There should be mandatory counseling and evaluation during and after the house arrest.