BANGOR – Calling Dennis Sirois a “thoroughly dangerous man,” Justice Andrew Mead on Tuesday sentenced the convicted rapist to 23 years in prison for a violent attack on a 72-year-old Edinburg woman last year.

“The only way to protect people is to remove him from civilized society,” Justice Mead said at Penobscot County Superior Court.

Just prior to hearing the sentence, Sirois, 35, stood before the court and emphatically proclaimed his innocence.

“I am not guilty of rape. This was consensual sex. Rape is an unmanly crime … and is committed by the lowest scum of the earth. That’s not what I’m about,” Sirois said.

After apologizing to his own family and the victim’s family, Sirois said, “I’m not apologizing because I’m guilty. I’m apologizing that I had a sexual encounter with [the victim].”

Sirois had little reaction to the sentence. His attorney, Jacqueline Gomes of Lincoln, told the justice that Sirois had experienced a traumatic and difficult childhood, marked by his mother’s depression and his father’s alcoholism. She asked the judge for a sentence of about 18 years.

Sirois has been convicted four times of armed robbery, twice in Maine and twice in Florida. He had been out of prison for only two months when the rape occurred in June 2000.

Assistant District Attorney Alice Clifford noted his serious and violent criminal history and his lack of remorse or acceptance of responsibility for the crime when she asked for a sentence between 27 and 35 years.

The victim was not at court on Tuesday, but her son-in-law told the judge that he should “have no mercy” for Sirois because the victim was now “living every day in a prison” of her own.

Feeling unsafe in her rural Edinburg home, the woman sold it and moved into Howland, he said.

Too scared to sleep upstairs in her bedroom, the woman sleeps on a sleep-sofa in the living room, he said, and still refuses to answer her door.

“I have to call ahead and tell her I’m on my way over or she won’t open the door,” said her son-in-law.

A deeply religious woman, the victim had returned home from a Saturday evening Mass when she answered a knock on her door, according to her testimony during the February 2001 trial.

Sirois, his face obscured by mosquito netting, pushed open the door, twisted her arm behind her back, made her turn around and forced her down the hall to her bedroom. She said he then pushed her face down on the bed, covered her head with clothes, pulled down her pajamas and raped her.

Sirois and his brother, who runs a landscaping business, had been working around the victim’s home the day before the attack.

When Sirois left her home on the night of the rape, the victim called for help and suffered a heart attack.

In pleading for a harsh sentence, the victim’s son-in-law acknowledged the closeness of the Howland community and said he and Sirois had known each other since childhood.

“Don’t let him come back on our streets. Nobody’s going to understand if you do,” he said.