Oh, sorry, it must not have been clear. He had previously been convicted of two rapes and sentenced to 27 years in prison. That was in 1983. He was found to be an SVP sometime in 2000-2002, when he was initially transferred to Atascedero State Hospital (rather than being paroled into the general population, I guess). He scared hospital staff and had a parole violation, and was sent back to prison again. Later he was re-paroled to another state hospital, where he served the rest of his sentence. He spent the last five years in this hospital with good behavior after initially being forced to take medication, which he thereafter took voluntarily.

He was not on trial for the rapes themselves, because he had already served 27 years. That sentencing had come and gone and was completely irrelevant to the case at hand, which was a CIVIL trial, not criminal. His term was up, and this case was to determine whether he should be hospitalized BEYOND what the initial charges required because he met the legal criteria for SVP. Note that being hospitalized is supposed to be therapeutic rather than a "punishment", but they couldn't tell us that his hospitalization would be for an "indefinite" (read: FOREVER) period of time because then we might have been biased to thinking we were giving him a life sentence (=punishment, in most reasonable people's heads).