Teacher Who Raped His Student Has Prison Sentence Extended From A Month To A Decade

by Caitlin White 38 mins ago

Auliea Hanlon has been fighting against the sentence that a teacher received for raping her daughter for six years—and she finally got some justice.

Back in 2008, 55-year-old Stacey Dean Rambold, a high school teacher in Montana, was accused of raping 14-year-old Cherice Moralez.

Rambold pled guilty to the charges, but as the case was going to trial Cherice took her own life in 2010, just a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday.

So when the sentence of just 31 days in prison arrived, it felt like even more of an injustice.

The appeal against Rambold’s mere month in jail argued that the statue used for his sentence, which was handed down by District Judge G. Todd Baugh, “[was] misapplied and the minimum sentence that could be imposed in Rambold’s case was two years.”

When the appeal was taken to the Montana Supreme Court in April of this year, they ruled that Baugh used an “inapplicable statute” to sentence Rambold and also barred him from handing down the new sentence. In his ruling, Baugh claimed that the victim looked older than her “chronological age” and was “probably as much in control of the situation as was the defendant.”

These comments infuriated Cherice’s mother who noted that she wasn’t even old enough to get a driver’s license when the rape took place. During the new trial, which was held yesterday (September 26) she argued that Rambold understood the impact his actions would have on her daughter and simply didn’t care.

“Here we are six, seven years later, still waiting for justice,” Hanlon said in a tearful speech while on the witness stand this Friday (September 26). “He knew what he was doing. He knew what was going to happen to her. And he didn’t care.”

At Friday’s hearing Judge Randal Spaulding re-sentenced Rambold to fifteen years with five years suspended. The month he previously served will also count toward his new sentence.

After Judge Baugh handed down the original decision in 2008 he faced intensive criticism for his language and victim-shaming behavior. Protests erupted and a a MoveOn.org petition with over 30,000 signatures was created calling for his resignation.

Though he didn’t resign, Baugh did apologize for some of his original commentary on the case.

“I am sorry I made those remarks,” he said. “They focused on the victim when that aspect of the case should have been focused on the defendant.”

Rambold will serve his time in Montana State Prison.