The state of Oregon has asked the Deschutes County Circuit Court to dismiss charges against Tami Sawyer, the former Bend real estate agent serving time in a federal prison. While the decision makes sense from the state’s point of view, it’s left relatives of Thomas Middleton with a sour taste in their mouths.

Sawyer had been accused of criminal mistreatment and theft for her handling of Middleton’s estate. Middleton died of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 2008. Sawyer, who had been asked to rent his house until the real estate market improved, instead sold it immediately, the state said, and the proceeds were deposited into bank accounts which she controlled.

Meanwhile, Sawyer has been convicted of fraud in federal court and is serving a nine-year sentence in California.

Were the state to go forward and win, the attorney general’s office says it’s not likely she would receive additional prison time, though she could ask to serve any concurrent sentence in an Oregon prison.

In that case, Oregon and not the federal government would pick up the tab for her time spent here. In addition, Oregon would be on the hook for the cost of the trial, which, Michael Kron of the attorney general’s office says, Sawyer could stretch out and make substantially more expensive.

Nor is it likely that Middleton’s heirs would receive any more restitution than has already been paid, Kron says. Federal officials seized Sawyer’s assets and paid them out; even so, she still owes several million dollars to her victims.

All that adds up to very practical reasons for dismissing the charges against Sawyer, to be sure. But for Middleton’s family and friends, what’s practical doesn’t feel like what’s right.

Sawyer’s treatment of Middleton and his heirs was terrible: The sons first had to watch Thomas Middleton die as a result of a particularly ugly disease, then watch again as a woman he had trusted violated that trust in the worst possible way. Now they watch as the state makes a practical, not emotional, decision to let matters rest.

It doesn’t feel like justice, we suspect, and from the Middleton family’s vantage point, we can see why.