Jaycee Dugard's abusers learning fate today
Phillip and wife Nancy Garrido are to be sentenced in California Thursday for kidnapping and brutalizing Jaycee Dugard over an 18-year period.
She was imprisoned and abused as she grew from a young girl to a young woman, and gave birth to two of Garrido's children.
The sentencing, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone, comes almost two decades after they snatched the then 11-year-old Dugard as she walked to her school bus.
The couple pleaded guilty in April to kidnapping Dugard and holding her captive all those years in a grotesque backyard compound that some described as unfit for animals.
Phillip Garrido, 60, faces a sentence of more than 400 years. Nancy, 55, faces 36 years.
"Garrido will go behind bars and will never have an opportunity to victimize another young girl," says Marc Klaas, president of the Klaas Kids Foundation, "and the same thing with his wife."
The guilty pleas spared Dugard, now 31, from testifying about her long captivity, during which she raised the two daughters Garrido fathered.
"She was ready, willing and able, if called to testify, she was prepared to do that," says El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson, "but, I think, there is also, as a mother, the practical reality of should her children be called and dragged into all of this."
Since being freed almost two years ago, Dugard has maintained her privacy, except for a photo session with People magazine. But next month, she will release a book she has written about her hellish 18 years.
It is, says Blackstone, a tale that can be both horrifying -- and hopeful.
"Jaycee Dugard gave hope to the parent of every missing child," Marc Klaas observed, "simply because she was gone so long and it was considered a closed case, yet she miraculously reappeared, and seemingly in good physical and emotional health."
But she could have been released years earlier if parole officers had been properly monitoring Garrido, a convicted sex offender. For that failure, the state of California paid Dugard $20 million.