DA goes on Facebook to protest light sentence given to confessed rapist
Image from dolphfyn / Shutterstock.com.
A California judge suspended most of the three-year sentence for a 20-year-old man accused of raping his younger sister, saying the stigma of the conviction and sex offender registration would be a sufficient deterrent to the defendant and others, according to the outraged district attorney in the case.
Judge William Follett sentenced the Crescent City man May 17 to three years in prison but suspended the sentence to 240 days, served half time, Del Norte County District Attorney Dale Trigg said in a Facebook post. That means the defendant will have to serve four months in prison, CNN, McClatchy News and Snopes.com report.
A deputy DA had requested a six-year sentence for the man, who had pleaded guilty to rape of an intoxicated person. According to prosecutors, the man’s 16-year-old sister repeatedly said she did not want to have sex with him, but she became so intoxicated after he gave her high-potency marijuana “dabs” that she no longer recognized him.
According to Trigg, the judge noted the victim had removed her own clothes and was not unconscious. “That to me is way out of line because you’re blaming the victim,” Trigg told CNN.
Trigg is exploring the possibility of an appeal.
A new law in California prohibits a sentence of probation or a suspended sentence when the victim is unconscious or incapable of giving consent due to intoxication. It was passed after former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner was sentenced to six months in jail for the sexual assault of an intoxicated unconscious woman.
But the law didn’t apply in the case before Follett because the crime took place before the law’s effective date of Jan. 1.
