I think I’m going to be sick.
An 18-year-old accused of raping and sexually assaulting two unconscious classmates in April will serve two years of probation, and will not carry a record of a criminal conviction or have to register as a sex offender.
David Becker, a three-sport high school athlete, will be permitted to leave Massachusetts and serve probation in Ohio, where he plans to attend college, and will not be required to register as a sex offender. No conviction will appear on his record if he complies with the terms of his probation.
“He can now look forward to a productive life without being burdened with the stigma of having to register as a sex offender,” said his attorney, Thomas Rooke, without any hint of acknowledgement of the lifelong consequences visited upon his victims. “The goal of this sentence was not to impede this individual from graduating high school and to go onto the next step of his life, which is a college experience.”
Does this sound familiar? A judge — who possibly sees a bit of himself in the face of the scared teen in front of him — focuses on the unfortunate consequences that would befall a criminal defendant if he were, you know, held accountable?
Oh, you must be thinking of Brock Turner, who was literally caught in the act of sexually assaulting a woman behind a dumpster. He was given a six-month sentence (not the six years sought by the prosecutor) because the judge thought, “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him.”
You know what doesn’t sound familiar? That same kind of empathy for anyone who is not a privileged white male. For example, Cory Batey, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the rape of an unconscious woman in a Vanderbilt University dorm room. He will not be eligible for early release.
Or maybe Brian Banks, who served 5 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of rape.
There should be a serious discussion about the proper consequences for sexual assault/rape, as well as the cost/benefit of the lifetime sex-offender registry. This is not that time. We can figure out what the appropriate consequences for these crimes are after we figure out how to ensure that similarly-situated criminals are treated similarly.
The stories above are not a sufficient data set from which we can determine why some (white, privileged) men get the “boys will be boys” treatment and other (black and/or poor) men get the “sexual super-predator” treatment. My intuition is that at least one contributor is the judge’s background, and its similarity to the defendant’s background.
Even leaving aside the ties between Brock Turner’s judge and Stanford University, the defendants who received little to no punishment were those whose background and appearance were similar to the judge they faced. Should we be surprised to learn that judges faced with a defendant from a similar slice of American life could more easily decide that the defendant was unlikely to re-offend, and empathize with the life-long negative consequences that would accompany a harsher punishment? And that conversely, a judge with little in common with a defendant might be less likely to project his own life onto the defendant?
Perhaps one day we’ll get this sorted out, and “Wealthy Teen Nearly Experiences Consequence” won’t be a triumph of black humor by The Onion, but an anacronisim.
And none of this even touches the hypocrisy of a middle-aged white dude from middle America writing about sexual assault sentencing policy without once mentioning the effects upon both past and future victims of sexual assault. I’d defend myself by saying that is a discussion for another day, but it’s always been a discussion for another day. To be fair, no one in any of the sex crime cases discussed above seemed to care much about the victims, either.