The Transformative Justice of Judge Aquilina

In 2013, a judge in Montana, G. Todd Baugh, sentenced a former high-school teacher who’d pleaded guilty to raping a 14-year-old student. Giving the accused a suspended sentence plus 31 days, with credit for time served, Baugh remarked that the victim was “older than her chronological age,” and was “as much in control of the situation” as the teacher had been. The teenager couldn’t respond, because she’d ended her own life in 2010, while the case against her rapist was pending.

The previous year, Arizona Judge Jacqueline Hatch who’d been sexually assaulted in a bar by a state trooper, “If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened.” In 2014, that the 14-year-old girl accuser “wasn’t the victim she claimed to be.” Last year,Utah Judge Thomas Low a former Mormon bishop convicted of rape as “an extraordinarily good man.”