Former teacher in Montana gets 30 days in jail for raping student who later committed suicide

because_misogyny · 2013-08-28T02:12:59+00:00

Only having the details in the article: That decision is really shitty and it shouldn't matter if the girl was willing or not she was below the age of consent.

I wish we (society) could be freaking consistent as to what constitutes an adult and what constitutes a child. There's too much situational shading that allows for these kinds of rulings.

CMOS222 · 2013-08-28T04:59:55+00:00

What. the. fuck.

And just how does one go about determining someone is "older than their chronological age"? And what is the point of sentencing someone to 15 years in prison and then suspending all but 31 days? That's just DESIGNED to hurt the victim's parents. This is messed up.

lazlounderhill · 2013-08-28T16:11:42+00:00

How is this a Mens Rights issue?

Lonemango · 2013-08-28T14:03:03+00:00

In this instance I would say that age is a non-issue as the man was her teacher. This power imbalance in that situation is too big. Even if she was 18 I would say that her teacher would be in the wrong for engaging her in sexual activities.

sophware · 2013-08-28T07:52:53+00:00

[permanently deleted]

giegerwasright · 2013-08-28T06:30:37+00:00

She was 14. He was 50. Statutory rape. Child molestation. Sex with a minor. Whatever the fuck you want to call it. She was 14. He was 50. She doesn't fit my definition of being able to give consent to a legal adult. Rape. He should have been fired. He should have been banned from teaching ever again. He should have been put in prison, no parole, for no less than 10 years. And I'm being generous. Both should have been put in serious psychiatric counselling.

What are you getting at, here, Ma99ie?

Number357 · 2013-08-29T03:53:27+00:00

This is bad, and the guy absolutely should have received a longer sentence.

However, it needs to be noted how this is handled vs how similar cases with reversed genders are handled. For one, this is called rape... period. Not statutory rape, not "sex with a minor," just plain old rape. I have never seen this when a woman is accused of statutory rape, instead, it is usually "sexual misconduct" or "sex with a minor."

Bohica69 · 2013-08-28T14:24:27+00:00

14 year olds are incapable of giving legal consent. He's a piece of shit.

2013-08-28T13:01:50+00:00

I don't know why this is here? This is an injustice on the victim/student's part, not the teachers.

2013-08-28T14:35:03+00:00

He was required to enter a guilty plea as part of a deferred adjudication agreement offered by the district attorney. That's not a real confession. It is obtained through coercion and threats.

In this case he did not have a trial. He entered into a probation agreement and was jailed briefly for violating the terms of his probation. That's all. The article is crap.

5th_Law_of_Robotics · 2013-08-28T13:19:27+00:00

That's awfully light for a man. Did the judge think "Stacey" was a woman?

tyciol · 2013-08-28T07:35:09+00:00

In July 2010, Rambold entered a three-year deferred prosecution agreement with prosecutors that said the charges would be dismissed if Rambold completed a sex offender treatment program and met other conditions, including having no contact with children. He also admitted to one rape charge.

Rambold was terminated from the program in November when it was learned that he had been having unsupervised visits with minors, who were family members, and did not inform counselors that he had been having sexual relations with a woman.

It seems that he is a threat to society, so 30 days of jail just doesn't cut it. That girl is now gone and more will be in danger. I don't know the reasoning behind the ruling, but it does seem like poor ruling all together. It's just not fair.

EDIT : Forgot to add that EVEN if she was really in control of the relationship, it reeks of statutory rape due to the position of power, so it's really non-consensual after all. And now he's free to keep having "consensual relationships" with students while she's gone...forever...

Lonemango · 2013-08-28T15:13:21+00:00

Let's say you're falsely accused of having sex with a minor, and you're a teacher. Let's say you had an after school tutoring session with one of your students, and later she told someone she had sex with you. Suddenly there are rumors swirling about it, and the parents find out and go ballistic on the teenager. The parents then put massive pressure on their teenager to file a charge against the teacher. They get counselors involved. They get the police involved and let the police interrogate the teenager to try to get a confession. They use all the usual police tricks, implying that they somehow know the teacher is a badguy and they've been watching him for a long time, that he's done this to other girls before. The next thing you know you've got a false statement against the teacher.

Then the police break into this teacher's house in the middle of the night, handcuff him, and take him to county jail. His wife, whom he may not have been getting along with recently anyway, is left wondering who to believe. Did he really do this? Suddenly her family and friends are telling her she needs to divorce him, that he's no good for her, that they never really liked him to begin with. The ball gets rolling.

In county jail he goes before a magistrate for arraignment. The magistrate reads the charge "sexual assault of child" in front of a bunch of uneducated street thugs in open court. When they hear those words, they're not picturing a teenage girl that looks like a sex 18-19 year old Playboy centerfold that seduces older men for fun. They're picturing this guy hiding in the bushes waiting to grab a 4-year-old boy to bugger him.

Thrown in with these thugs, the teacher gets the crap beaten out of him for being a "child molester" despite never having committed an actual crime. Meanwhile his wife is trying to decide whether or not she should try to raise the money for his bail. A teacher's pay may not cover it. If his bail was set at $30,000, a bondsman will ask for $3,000, and in this economy the teacher probably doesn't have it. With a sex charge you're not going to get a PR bond, and those take time to get.

Maybe he sees an opportunity to stop getting his ass kicked, so he tells the guards he's suicidal and he's removed from the general population of the county lockup and put in a suicide watch cell. These are usually a small room with rubber coated walls and no furniture, and a light that never goes out. You won't have the steel toilets the other cells have, and instead have to defecate and urinate into a grate in the floor. Instead of the typical prisoner uniform, you'll be put into a paper smock, so you're essentially naked in a freezing cold room. The idea is to torture you as much as possible so you'll say you're not suicidal and be thrown back to the wolves.

Let's say he somehow gets bail money. Lucky for him. He gets out on bail, but he no longer has a job. He lost it when he didn't show up for work, and they found out about the charges. He'll never work as a teacher again in his life. His career is over.

Also, his wife is filing for divorce. Even if she believes he's innocent, the pressure is too much for her to deal with. She can't be with someone that the whole community believes is a child molester. Again, somehow they're not picturing the sexy Playboy centerfold material that was pretending to be 18. They're thinking this was an innocent little girl.

If he can afford a lawyer, he's looking at anywhere from $7,000 to $30,000 in legal fees. If he's lucky he'll find a decent local lawyer for $10,000 for pre-trial services, and pay $1,000 for a polygraph test to try to prove his innocence. If he gets a public defender he's probably screwed. They're overwhelmed. If he has a hard time getting his case to trial, he may be lucky enough to get a court-appointed defense attorney, but they only do this stuff to keep their license to practice. You won't get their full efforts. If anything they will be looking for a way to get you to take a probation deal. In fact, even a paid lawyer will probably be thinking this way.

Especially with a first offense the district attorney is likely to offer the teacher a deferred adjudication probation agreement. What this means is that you will be heavily restricted with terms that are designed to trip you up, like not being around children of any age despite the fact that your alleged victim was a teenager. You'll be forced to give a blood sample. You'll be forced to agree to report all of your sexual activity, even masturbation or looking at pornography. You may be denied the right to use a computer or the internet. If you're given permission to use computers at home without internet access, you may find that your probation officer has no clue what the difference is between the internet and an intranet LAN, and you'll get charged with violating your probation. Anything and everything possible to screw you up will be thrown at you.

Even if you're a perfectly normal person with normal sexual desires and habits, you will be entered into counseling and you'll be required to "confess" to all kinds of things you probably haven't done. It's part of the "treatment".

To qualify for these agreements you have to enter a plea of guilty or nolo contendre (no contest) on the forms. You cannot get a deferred adjudication agreement with a not guilty plea. You don't have to actually be guilty. You just have to enter it on the forms.

The premise is that once your probation is completed you should be able to get the records expunged and your slate will be clean. The reality is that this is a lie and your records will not be expunged, and a judge is not required to allow this at such a hearing. You may also end up on lifetime probation as a registered sex offender, and constantly threatened with going to prison based on false charges of failure to register. This happens all the time.

Why would anyone take this kind of a deal? Because on the surface it looks like you have your freedom. Because you're not in jail being beaten up... today. The problem is you will most likely end up in jail again on an agreement like this. It's all a lie offered by a corrupt state. Defense attorneys deal with the pre-trial and trial phases of the justice system, so they're actually often somewhat shielded from the aftermath of these agreements they get their clients to sign. They just get their big fat paychecks and go home.

Do not assume that this man was guilty based on him taking a deferred adjudication deal.

Nutz76 · 2013-08-28T17:47:49+00:00

The headline is inaccurate as her suicide was 3 years later. Putting the two pieces of information together like that implies causation, which is just unfounded speculation by the author.

As for the case at hand, this wasn't forced rape, it was statutory rape, and a tricky one at that. It's a tough case because 14 is the age of consent if the other person is within 3 years of the minor's age, and 16 for all others, which begs the question: if 14 is mature enough to decide to have sex with someone in their peer group, why aren't they able to decide to have sex with someone out of it? The logic behind the 30 day sentence was that the girl was mature for her age and equally complicit, and in control of, the sexual relationship. Legally it was non-consensual/illegal sex, but in reality it was consensual. The judge evaluated those extenuating circumstances and ruled on a light sentence. I see nothing wrong with this. In fact I think that's a much more reasonable response to what happened than the knee-jerk reaction people are having to the '14 year old raped, perp gets 30 days' mischaracterization. Having said that, what makes it bad in my mind is that he was a teacher charged with the care and safety of the minors he's responsible for. In effect he's the parent while the kids are at school, so it's analogous to a parent diddling their own kid, of which the ages of the two parties shouldn't matter.

As a parent I think age of consent should be done away with since we have new tools for handling relationships we find inappropriate, namely restraining orders. If and only if the kid and/or adult violate the restraining order should they be hauled off to jail or fined. Combined with that I also support laws prohibiting teachers (and any other person in a position of power over minors) from having sexual relationships with children under their care. If it were up to me I'd make it a felony with a mandatory minimum of something like 1-5 years. Way too many teachers are doing this these days and it's got to stop.

tyciol · 2013-08-28T07:57:23+00:00

Rambold was terminated from the program in November when it was learned that he had been having unsupervised visits with minors, who were family members...

So this could mean he could be meeting with his two 17 year old sons/nephews. Relevance? Restriction's clearly too broad.

and did not inform counselors that he had been having sexual relations with a woman.

I get the potential relevance of the first part, but I'm not entirely clear why someone in the program would be obligated to inform counselors about their having relations with a woman.

Imagine how this would look flipping the genders.

"Okay Mrs. Krobopple, we know you hooked up with Nelson Muntz last year, do you have anything you wanted to tell me?"

"I quit smoking?"

"Anything else?"

"No..."

"Well Principal SKINNER told me that you sucked his cock last night! WHY DIDNT YOU TELL ME!?!? I have to kick you out of the program now, you're going to jail, Edna"

yourotherusername · 2013-08-28T13:54:15+00:00

The decision is shitty. Yes. But there is a reason for the decision.

From the Missoulian

On Tuesday, Baugh stood by his comments that Morales was a troubled youth who was older than her age when it came to sexual matters. That didn’t make Rambold’s sex with Morales any less of a crime, he said.

“Obviously, a 14-year-old can’t consent. I think that people have in mind that this was some violent, forcible, horrible rape,” Baugh said. “It was horrible enough as it is, just given her age, but it wasn’t this forcible beat-up rape.”

Baugh said Morales’ death complicated the county attorney’s ability to prosecute Rambold. After Morales’ suicide, the prosecution and defense reached an agreement that Rambold would enter sexual offender treatment. If the former teacher completed treatment and complied with other conditions, the case would have been closed.

But Rambold broke terms of the agreement by associating with teens, who were his relatives, and by becoming sexually involved with an adult, but not notifying authorities.

“I think what people are seeing is a sentence for rape of 30 days. Obviously on the face of it, if you look at it that way, it’s crazy,” Baugh said. “No wonder people are upset. I’d be upset, too if that happened.”

What the judge is quoted as saying “as much in control of the situation” and “older than her chronological age” is rape apology. (Hold that downvote!, hear me out!) It doesn't matter if both of those things are true. It was still statutory AND using a position of power over a minor. He should have just been honest, without the girl alive, we have shit for a case and this asshole, who admitted to the crime, abused his power is going to go free with a slap on the wrist.

Vandredd · 2013-08-28T15:09:55+00:00

Stat rape laws have to be concrete and gender blind.

Title	Former teacher in Montana gets 30 days in jail for raping student who later committed suicide
Author	Ma99ie
Upvotes	77
Comments	125
Date	August 28, 2013 2:02 AM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1l8cuh/former_teacher_in_montana_gets_30_days_in_jail/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/former-teacher-in-montana-gets-30-days-in-jail-for.1165304 https://theredarchive.com/post/1165304

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