Ran into a segfault and some memory leaks. Fixed them and added a decorator.

[otherwiseguy]

I tried not to change any behavior, but went ahead and refactored a little to reduce the indentation level while also handling the Py_DECREFs for the newly returned references.

[ajdavis]

Hi, I'm sorry this took me so long to notice your pull request. Can you please split it into individual PRs that handle one thing at at time? (On your end you'll want to move the commits to separate branches.)

Also, can you tell me how to reproduce the segfault?

Thanks!!