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Vt. Supreme Court upholds life sentence in assault

The Vermont Supreme Court has upheld the life-without-parole sentence of a former Burlington man convicted of trying to kill his girlfriend. In a decision issued Friday, the court rejected a petition filed by 70-year-old Norman Stevens. Stevens was sentenced in 2001 for the 1999 assault on his former girlfriend, whom he attacked with a hammer in a motel room. He was preparing to set fire to his van with the woman inside, but was stopped by neighbors. The trial court sentenced Stevens after concluding that he had a well-developed plan to kill his former girlfriend and that he had tried to shoot his wife and two children in 1977. The court rejected Stevens’s argument that the sentence was cruel and unusual punishment.