Colleen Hall says she had no other choice than to go for her gun when her husband, in another drunken rage that left much of their home in ruin, grabbed their toddler grandson and began striding toward their farm pond to drown the boy.

Daniel Hall had had his fill of the 2-year-old boy's crying by that night last August, and he never cared much for the kid anyway, Colleen Hall recalled. So with no time to call police, she says, she saved the boy by stopping her husband dead with five rounds outside their rural Bunker Hill home.

During Colleen Hall's sentencing hearing Wednesday, such testimony meant to help decide her fate did little to sort out what happened - or whether Daniel Hall really had to die.

Many of Daniel Hall's kin pressed for prison, casting Colleen Hall as a murderous 46-year-old queen of fiction about the dead man they called caring. But the couple's three sons rallied around mom, depicting her as a probation-deserving saint, of sorts, who weathered three decades of assaults at the hands of a father they termed an animal who had it coming.

So with prosecutors seeking a 10-year prison sentence and Colleen Hall's defenders saying she should walk free, Macoupin County Circuit Judge Patrick Londrigan reached the outcome that satisfied no one - four years in prison.

Probation "would deprecate the seriousness of the offense," he declared, then agreed with prosecutors that Colleen Hall had other less-lethal options during her stormy relationship, perhaps including just walking away.

Prosecutors weren't available afterward for comment. But one of the dead man's brothers who testified for them Wednesday decried the punishment as too lenient for a killer. "We're all going by her story," Ron Hall said after earlier testifying he didn't believe his sister-in-law's account.

Colleen Hall pleaded guilty April 4 to second-degree murder, punishable by probation to 15 years in prison. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop counts of first-degree murder and aggravated assault, as well as cap the state's sentencing request at 10 years behind bars.

Most of the 10 witnesses who testified on Colleen Hall's behalf, including her sons, described Daniel Hall as a Jekyll-and-Hyde type whose dark side was a hair-trigger temper often set off by his virtual daily abuse of alcohol.

Daniel Hall's blood-alcohol content the night he died, an investigator said Wednesday, was .19, nearly two and a half times the state's legal threshold for intoxication.

"He was like the Incredible Hulk," his outbursts fanned by beer, said Danny Hall, one of Hall's sons and the 22-year-old father of the toddler he credits his mom for saving. He called his mom's shooting of his father "the perfect decision that day."

Hogwash, countered one of Daniel Hall's other brothers. In a statement read in court by prosecutor Jennifer Watson, Mike Hall said his late brother had been "happy-go-lucky" and a "good man who cared about his family."

"Only a cold person could have shot Daniel five times," his statement read. "I think she should accept responsibility for killing Daniel. I think she owes the family that much."

But on Wednesday, Colleen Hall testified she had little recourse but to kill her husband, the same man she called her first love but who was physically abusive and a drinker since before they married in 1978.

The night of the shooting, she insisted, an argument over her failure to water plants escalated into Daniel Hall's trying to force their grandson into watching a porn movie, saying he wanted the boy to become a serial killer and porn star.

Daniel Hall then smashed the television set with a hammer and left the living room in shambles before grabbing the boy and walking out toward the pond to drown the child, Colleen Hall said.

"Whether Daniel Hall was a citizen of the year or a bad man, he didn't deserve to be shot," she told the judge. "We cannot allow society to go around shooting people because they are mean."

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