Recently in Texas, there was a principle who went to court for soliciting sex acts from a 15 year old student. Now, the “minimum penalty” for such an act is 2-20 years in prison. YET, he plead guilty, and is somehow getting away with only SIX MONTHS of prison time, plus he has to register as a sex offender. Registering as a sex offender shouldn’t be anything big, he should do that no matter what. What I want to know is, why is it if he pled “Not Guilty” and a jury found him otherwise, he could be sentenced to 20 years of prison, yet because he pled “Guilty” right off the bat, he’s getting away with six months? Is it just me, or does something not seem right with this little act of “Justice”?
A link would be nice.
Ususally this sort of thing happens when the powers that be are not confident they will get a conviction at all, and so go for a sure thing rather than take a chance and lose everything.
It would be easier to judge how outraged I should be if I knew what “soliciting” meant in this case. Did he just walk up to her in the hall one day and say “Hey baby, wanna suck my cock?” or was it a persistiant pattern of harrassment?
If it was just the former, six months in prison and a record that should keep him from ever working around kids again seems appopriate.
In my state it depends on how old the teacher is.
There are different standards for differences over 10 years in age. If the teacher is also a minor (possible in a private school, where Teacher titles are given to student teachers), then it’s possible that no crime was committed if the actions of both parties were comparable, such as if she flashed a little skin as a tease and he took it as an offer of sex.
i think we definitely need more info on this.
if the minimum for his crime was 2 years, and he is only getting 6 months, it only makes sense that what he actually pled guilty to was a lesser crime. which means they didn’t think they could convict him on crime a, he wasn’t sure they couldn’t, so he pled guilty to crime b, a similar but less serious charge.
i’m not in any kind of law-related field, but i watch lots of tv. 
In Scotland, people are entitled to discounts for pleading guilty at an early stage in the proceedings.
We don’t have minimum sentences, and we don’t have the sentence agreed as part of the plea.
It may be, in this case, that the principal was able to get a lesser sentence by pleading guilty (or he was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser crime), because that avoided the necessity of the witnesses giving evidence - often an unpleasant experience with sexual type crimes.
Certainly, in Scotland, this is specifically mentioned when sentence is being pronounced.
ABUSE ANGEL –
Not necessarily. With a minimum sentence of two years, a person could very well be back out on the street in six months. That’s because very few prisoners spend as much time in prison as they are sentenced to; you can serve part of that sentence on parole, for example, and you can further reduce your prison time by racking up “good time,” which is a sentence reduction contingent on behaving yourself – ie, for every day you behave, you earn a day of “good time,” which is a day off your sentence.
If the person in question was sentenced at the minimum 2-20, and got the minimum there (2), then he could well be out in 6 months. And one of the things you bargain for when “plea bargaining” is a recommendation from the prosecutor that you receive a lighter sentence in exchange for pleading guilty. (An aside: A plea bargain is only a recommendation to the judge, who doesn’t have to accept it if she doesn’t think it’s fair or adequate.)
Remember that your principal is your pal.
[sub]unless, of course he is a pedophile[/sub] 
Good time and parole in TEXAS?!? They don’t have such things anymore.
ok, jodi, like i said, i got that from tv. but the op didn’t seem to say that he only served 6 mos, but that he was only sentenced to 6 mos. if there is a minimum sentence, how can he be sentenced to less? isn’t that what a minimum sentence means??
True - sorta, almost.
The sentence recommendation portion of the plea bargain is, as Jodi suggests, simply a recommendation, and the judge is not bound by it.
The charge to which the plea is offered, however, goes more to prosecutorial discretion than to judicial discretion. That is, a judge may not say, “I refuse to accept your guilty plea to assualt, because the Commonwealth has enough to here to try you for attempted murder.” The judge may excoriate the Commonwealth Attorney for his incompetence, but in the end, the prosecutor’s office has almost unbridled discretion as to what charges to file, or to modify, and accept a plea to in a particular case.
A judge may kick a plea for the opposite reason – that is, he may find that the plea is unsupported by the prosecutor’s proffer, or the accused’s allocution is unsatisfactory. In other words, he may refuse to accpet a guilty plea if he believes that there is no chance that the Commonwealth could prove every element of the offense at trial, or if the accused, while pleading guilty, indicates he didn’t do the acts of which he’s accused. (An accused may offer an Alford plea, in which he does not have to admit to the acts.)
- Rick
ABUSEANGEL – I can only point out that we still don’t have a link so we don’t know what the guy was actually sentenced to, but the OP doesn’t say he was sentenced to six months, but rather that the sentence range is 2 to 20 but that the guy will only get six months “prison time.” All I was saying is that six months served out of, say, an 2 to 5 year sentence would not be uncommon since being out but on parole counts as “serving time,” using that term in its broadest sense.