A 68-year-old man who repeatedly sexually assaulted a seven-year-old girl was sentenced to 18 years to life in state prison following an emotional hearing in Ulster County Court on Thursday. The sentence handed down by County Court Judge Bryan Rounds came after Joseph P. Buboltz of Kingston pleaded guilty to a single count of predatory sexual assault against a child, a Class A felony.

Prosecutor Nicholas LaStella said the abuse began in March 2021 and went on for about a year while the victim was on court-mandated visits with another member of Buboltz’s household. During that time, prosecutors say, Buboltz repeatedly engaged in sex acts with the child. Buboltz has been held in the Ulster County Jail without bail since his arrest on Sept. 12, 2022.

On Thursday, the slightly built bespectacled retired custodian at the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park entered Rounds’ courtroom dressed in a county jail jumpsuit and using a walker. Sitting at the defense table, Buboltz exhibited a visible tremor during the nearly hour-long proceeding. Rounds began the hearing by noting that he had added three years to the minimum sentence negotiated between the defense and prosecutors after Buboltz declined to take full responsibility — and in fact attempted to shift responsibility to the child victim — in a pre-sentencing interview with officials at the Ulster County Probation Department. Buboltz had faced a maximum sentence of 25 years to life on the predatory sexual assault charge.

The victim’s mother gave an emotional victim’s impact statement in which she described the devastating effect of Buboltz’s actions on her daughter. The woman, whose name is being withheld to protect the identity of the victim, described her daughter as a “miracle baby” who had beaten the odds and thrived despite her premature birth and other health problems. Buboltz’s assaults, she said, had left the now nine-year-old girl with PTSD, an inability to trust adults or recognize boundaries, night terrors and a propensity for temper tantrums.

“You took her happiness, her free spirit, her smile,” the victim’s mother told Buboltz. “You’ve become the worst thing that could have happened to her.”

Buboltz’s attorney, Ulster County Assistant Public Defender Cindy Chazkin, laid out what she said were mitigating factors in her client’s defense, including what she called a “mild developmental disability” for which Buboltz had received services from the state. Chazkin added that Buboltz had no prior criminal history, had maintained steady employment at the FDR Library for two decades and had lost his wife of 28 years.

In his own statement to the court, delivered against the advice of his attorney, Buboltz grew tearful as he expressed remorse and a desire to “sit down and talk it out” with the victim’s family. At one point, Buboltz praised the victim’s mother’s parenting skills and told her he appreciated the way she dressed the child.

“I do have remorse and I don’t know what happened; I didn’t wake up one day and plan this happening” said Buboltz. “I never thought about this, I didn’t want it.”

Rounds, meanwhile, blasted what he called Buboltz’s lack of remorse, as evidenced by statements given to the police and later to probation officials. After allowing the victim’s family an opportunity to leave the courtroom, which they declined, Rounds went into a graphic description on Buboltz’s abuse — something he said was essential to establish a clear record in plain language for future reference by parole officials of police officers seeking insight into the mind of a molester.

“The details are important because the record is important,” said Rounds. “Despite his age, you never know he could one day end up in front a parole board.”

Rounds noted that the abuse did not occur on just one occasion but was part of an ongoing “course of conduct” targeting the child. Rounds added that Buboltz had told police and probation officers that the seven-year-old had initiated the abuse and he did not want to deny her.

Rounds said the statement showed that Buboltz had no remorse for his actions, only for getting caught. Rounds added that Buboltz was a rare case of child sex abuse being reported, prosecuted and ending in a conviction; something he attributed to the relatively low priority given by the criminal justice system to protecting children compared with other types of crimes.

“You can tell what the priorities are by where we put our money, where we put our resources,” said Rounds. “So what does that say about us?”

Rounds added that he believes lengthy sentences for sex crimes involving minors were entirely appropriate given the amount of damage done to both the victim’s and society at large. Rounds said that in his time on the bench and prior to that as a defense attorney, he had been shocked at the proportion of felony criminal defendants who came into the system with a history of childhood sex abuse. Rounds compared Buboltz’s offense with that of a defendant in a typical second-degree murder case involving, as the judge put it, “two guys getting into it on the street.”

“You murdered her childhood,” said Rounds. “You murdered for her mother her childhood.”