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Buddy Stuart was in a hurry on Saturday. You see he had to do some work at his woodworking shop in downtown Milton before rushing off to his 12-year-old son Colby's hockey game.

He definitely didn't want to miss it, because it would be the last one he'd see for a while. After the game he knew he'd spend the majority of the rest of the weekend comforting his 14-year-old daughter, Taylor, who has Down's syndrome.

"She doesn't stop crying," Stuart said.

You see she's having a hard time understanding why daddy has to go to jail for two weeks.

Others may, too.

Buddy Stuart admits he fired a gun into the air last September while standing at the top of a flight of stairs leading to an apartment above his woodshop. He says he did it to avert an altercation between a threatening tenant and one of his workers.

He said firing the gun worked as he hoped. The confrontation dissolved as police arrived and took Stuart into custody. They arrested him for felony reckless conduct for shooting the Glock handgun.

They never arrested the tenant for criminal threatening, however, saying there wasn't enough proof, Stuart said on Saturday.

"I still feel like I did nothing wrong," he said. "I was trying to keep someone from getting hurt."

Maybe that's what Jack Warden was doing in the 1970s movie And Justice For All when he fired his gun during a courtroom melee.

As the melee quickly melts, in the best line of the movie, Warden quips, "May I remind all of you, you are in a court of law."

Shooting a gun into the air to break up a fight is almost a cliché in American culture, as American as apple pie and baseball, at least on TV and in cinema.

What cowboy film icon hasn't done it?

None of this condones Stuart for what he did. But it should have given pause to prosecutors who never chose to interview Stuart personally to get his version of the events that September afternoon.

Strafford County Attorney Tom Velardi recently said Stuart was getting a fair deal with the two-week sentence and a year of probation. He said he based that statement on looking at similar cases in which a gun was fired under similar circumstances.

But if Stuart thought he was preventing someone from getting hurt, from perhaps being injured or killed, would a jury have unanimously found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of reckless conduct?

That's a question that haunts Stuart, who decided to take the two weeks and be done with it rather than double down with a risky trial.

After paying legal bills for more than a year, it seemed the prudent thing. A trial wouldn't be cheap after all.

Still, to avoid jail, he offered to do community work. A skilled carpenter, he said he told authorities he'd build park benches for every town in Strafford County to beautify their park areas and downtowns to stay out of jail and keep his business going.

No dice, prosecutors said. Two weeks. No work release. No nothing.

He reports Monday at 5 p.m.

We're sure anyone who's ever watched Law and Order has found themselves scratching their heads at the end of a show.

We watch the local version and sometimes do the same. For instance, we've seen defendants guilty of knocking a man senseless walk with no jail time.

We saw an octogenarian dragged through the court system for putting his arms around a Meals on Wheels lady, grabbing her buttocks and licking her face when he probably should've just been put in a home. He died before his case could be resolved.

Recently the Strafford County Attorney's Office decided not to go forward with any charges against Leslie Pollard, the husband of Rochester's Economic Development Director, in a hit-and-run case from last December. They said they ended the case because they couldn't prove he was driving the vehicle at the time of the crash. His wife, Karen Pollard, was also in the car that left the Lowell Street accident scene after hitting a Rochester woman they'd been allegedly drinking with earlier that night at a Rochester social club.

And don't forget Leslie Pollard confessed to the crime at the booking table, according to an arresting officer the night of the incident.

No DWI, no witness tampering, no obstruction, nothing. Not even a press release announcing the Attorneys Office decision. We found out about two weeks before the Foster's did while seeking a routine case update.

We're pretty sure some laws were broken that night, but I guess we'll have to wait on that justice.

You'd think someone could have gotten a couple of week in jail at least.

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