More:A 67-year-old was convicted of a sex crime. The judge said the child victims were ‘an aggressor.’
A Kansas judge is under fire not only for giving a sex crime defendant a significantly reduced sentence but also for suggesting that the victims — two girls ages 13 and 14 — are partially culpable.
“I do find that the victims in this case are more of an aggressor than a participant in the criminal conduct,” Leavenworth County District Judge Michael Gibbens said during a recent sentencing hearing just outside of Kansas City, Kan. “They were certainly selling things monetarily that’s against the law for even an adult to sell.”
Gibbens also said he’s “not convinced” that the victims, who are sisters, suffered substantial harm.
The defendant is Raymond Soden, a 67-year-old man who was arrested last year after, prosecutors said, he used social media to solicit sex from the minors. Soden reached a deal with the Leavenworth County Attorney’s Office, and in December, was sentenced to five years in prison — about eight years short of the minimum punishment recommended in the state’s sentencing guidelines.
The case attracted widespread attention this week after the Kansas City Star obtained a transcript of the sentencing hearing. On Monday, the newspaper published an editorial saying that Gibbens “made a serious mistake” by setting Soden’s sentence so low and that he shouldn’t be a judge.
“If Gibbens believes that child sex abuse victims are somehow aggressors, he doesn’t belong on the bench,” [I'd say that's a fair and accurate assessment...] according to the paper’s editorial board.
A call to Gibbens’s office Tuesday was not returned.
Leavenworth County Attorney Todd Thompson said his office is reviewing the possibility of appealing the sentence. Judges are bound by Kansas’s sentencing guidelines, and there must be a “substantial and compelling reason” for judges to go below or above the recommended punishments. Thompson’s office can argue that it doesn’t exist in Soden’s case.
Thompson said it would be unethical for him to comment on what Gibbens said in his courtroom.
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