Kansas City, Mo. ? A convicted serial rapist who attacked his latest victim while free on probation has been sentenced to 124 years in prison.

In imposing the sentence Tuesday, Jackson County Judge J.D. Williamson told 48-year-old Gregory Hubbard he had “no option but to protect the public by seeing you are not on the streets again.”

Williamson convicted Hubbard of a string of charges, including attempted forcible rape, during an August trial.

Hubbard’s criminal record dates back to 1978 and includes convictions for rape and assault with attempt to rape. State officials couldn’t keep him confined indefinitely as a sexual predator when he was to be released from prison in December 2000.

The Missouri attorney general’s office asked that Hubbard receive a psychiatric evaluation, but a Jackson County Circuit judge and an appeals court ruled the state didn’t have enough evidence of mental abnormality to hold him.

After his release, Hubbard was charged in August 2002 with forcible rape and two counts of forcible sodomy related to an attack against a 61-year-old woman. But prosecutors said the case was weak, and they had to offer Hubbard a deal that put him on three years’ probation.

Out of prison again, prosecutors said Hubbard tried to rape a Kansas City woman in April 2004. When she screamed for help, he stabbed her, slicing her liver.

Assistant Prosecutor Jean Baker asked Williamson to order multiple life sentences during Tuesday’s hearing.

“It’s almost mind-boggling,” Baker said of Hubbard’s crimes. “This man is a predator” who gets pleasure from seeing “the fear in their eyes.”

But the defense asked the judge for minimal sentences that would allow parole.