Judge who said teenager who filmed himself raping girl 'deserves leniency because he's from a good family’ gets death threats
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Judge who said teenager who filmed himself raping girl 'deserves leniency because he's from a good family’ gets death threats
Maya Oppenheim, The Independent Tue, Jul 9 6:42 AM EDT
A New Jersey judge who said a teenage boy accused of rape should get leniency because he came from a “good family” has received threats amid a ferocious backlash against his ruling.
James Troiano denied a request in 2018 for a 16-year-old boy accused of raping an intoxicated 16-year-old girl to be tried as an adult.
The Monmouth County Superior Court Judge said the defendant “comes from a good family who put him into an excellent school where he was doing extremely well.”
The teenage boy was accused of recording himself sexually assaulting the 16-year-old girl and sending the video to friends with the caption “when your first time is rape.”
Mr Troiano’s decision, which surfaced last week, sparked a fierce response and has been viewed as evidence the US legal system is two-tier and has different rules for those who are privileged.
The 69-year-old, who has spent almost three decades on the bench, and his family are now receiving death threats and there have been a number of calls for him to resign, reports the New York Times .
Mr Troiano and his family have received multiple threatening emails and calls, according to a source who spoke to the publication.
One email reportedly told the judge that should be raped by a man “stronger than you”.
A Change.org petition calls for the NJ State Assembly to impeach the judge and a protest is scheduled to take place at Monmouth County Superior Court later this week.
The threats come as politicians and members of the public call for Mr Troiano to be disbarred, including from Democratic presidential hopeful Cory Booker.
The New Jersey senator said: “Not only should this judge no longer serve - as he is clearly incapable of properly fulfilling his duties - but across the country, we must call out bad actors in the system, exposing their biases, and show women and survivors that we will doggedly pursue justice on their behalf".
The teenager is accused of raping a girl, who has been referred to under the alias of Mary in court documents, in a basement during a house party in 2017.
Court documents say Mary was intoxicated, slurring her words and stumbling as she walked into the basement with the teenager. They say she suffered bruising and hand prints from others slapping her on her backside, which she told her mother about the next day.
Court documents say the accused teen allegedly recorded the assault and shared it with friends – adding that the girl's bare torso is exposed and her head is repeatedly banged against a wall in the recording.
Mary and her family chose to press charges months later when the defendant carried on sharing the clip, despite the girl asking him to stop.
Family court proceedings are usually closed to the public but some of Mr Troiano’s remarks - taken from a 65-page transcript of his sealed decision - were revealed when an appeals court decision surfaced.
The Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court reversed Mr Troiano's decision in June - sending the case back down for further judgment.
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I don't think the scumbag should be receiving death threats but he needs to be disbarred. What a scumbag.
Just like the Brock Turner incident FFS.
Different set of rules for the privileged.
Shameful! I agree that he should be disbarred.
Alan Dershowitz should be disbarred for fingering kids with Epstein, too...
Had I posted this seed I would have flagged and successfully had that comment removed for having been off topic. Anyway, JBB, do you think that jealousy of Dershowitz's status, success and brilliance will win you something?
OMG! I actually agree with Tessy on something. Yes this judge should be removed.
It is a good thing I am currently at a rehab facility and will be able to get some help and get back to sanity quickly! Where is that nurses call button!
The judge is an idiot, while family can indeed influence how a kid turns out there's no guarantee and in this case something obviously went wrong. However whoever is sending the threats is also an idiot
If the kid was from a good family- his family would want him to receive proper sentencing, and then work to get him the help his over privileged ass needs.
What is worse it sounds like the girl was willing to let him get away with it until he refused to stop sending to his friends- who I am sure forwarded it on. The kid needs a hard dose of reality.
The judge doesn't deserve death threats, but may it is time for him to retire?
[deleted.]
That sounds pretty damned ignorant. Let him get away with it?
Or perhaps her family did not want to force her to replay the horror over and over again to the press and in court. I personally would have pushed for my daughter to do everything to lock up the scum, but that was their decision.
From the article.
Sounds like she and her family only chose to press charges when the ass refused to stop sharing the clip. Sorry if you don't like my wording. How about let it slide? Let him off the hook? Enabled his self entitlement?
What about his next victim? There will most definitely be next if he doesn't receive a harsh sentence. He won't learn a damn thing.
And that is what should have been done from the start.
Their decision would have allowed there to be a next victim for this entitled ass. With a lite sentence there still could be another victim in his future.
And thanks to Acosta he did have that opportunity.
Why Are Judges So Concerned About the Future Potential of Rapists?
In 1989, members of the Glen Ridge, New Jersey football team raped a 17-year-old girl in the basement of one of the boys’ houses. The girl had an intellectual disability, and was later reported to have an IQ of about 64. The boys took turns orally and vaginally penetrating her, and then penetrated her with a broom and a baseball bat, both of which were covered in baggies coated with Vaseline. One of them said they should stop, a suggestion that was ignored. The boys then told the girl not to tell anyone, then told her to leave. The incident was only reported to the police when a teacher overheard one of the boys bragging to another student that they were planning to coax a repeat performance out of the girl, which they planned to videotape.
In 1993, three of the men were sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in a prison for “young offenders” for their role in the gang rape. But many in the town did not even think they should have been charged with a crime, let alone prosecuted. As journalist Bernard Lefkowitz documented in his book Our Guys, many residents of the predominantly white, upper middle-class town immediately rallied around the boys, with many parents blaming the teenage girl for seducing the boys and cheerleaders donning yellow ribbons at graduation to support the accused. In an archival photo of the Glen Ridge football players leaving the courthouse, they look like exactly what they are: privileged, white, upper-middle-class boys. The overwhelming consensus among townspeople was that they had everything to lose by being publicly named sex offenders, and that they shouldn’t have to pay such a steep price for having engaged in such harmless hijinks; they were, after all, “our guys,” as they were called by the adoring female high school students who were known to arrive on their doorsteps with home-cooked meals for them.
Today, the Glen Ridge rape case is largely confined to the annals of Wikipedia; when it is referenced at all, it is usually to demonstrate how much our society has progressed in terms of its treatment of female sexual assault survivors. It’s the kind of story we can look back at in the rearview mirror and give ourselves a gentle pat on the shoulder to remind us of how far we’ve come, and how much we’ve learned since then. But if there’s any real lesson to be gleaned from the Glen Ridge rape case, it’s that we haven’t come very far at all.
Last month, in Monmouth County, New Jersey, about an hour south of Glen Ridge, Judge James Troiano denied prosecutors’ motion to charge a 16-year-old boy accused of sexual assault as an adult. The boy had filmed himself having sex with an intoxicated 16-year-old girl, who could not stand up straight and had slurred speech; shortly after the video was taken, she vomited, and woke up the next morning with bruises all over her body. The boy later sent the video to friends with the text, “When your first time having sex was rape.”
Although New Jersey law allows offenders as young as 15 to be charged as adults for serious crimes, Troiano declined to do so, issuing a nearly two-hour ruling citing the boy’s academic achievements and privileged background to support his decision not to charge the boy within the full extent of the law. “He is clearly a candidate for not just college but probably for a good college,” Troiano said, adding that prosecutors should have told the judge to tell the sexual assault victim — “the alleged victim here, and I call her the alleged victim here,” as he put it — to have considered the boy’s potential when deciding whether to press charges against him.
Troiano’s ruling was concerning enough for an appeals court to issue a 14-page rebuke accusing him of harboring bias against the accused; there is currently a petition on Change.org to impeach him, and the media coverage of his ruling has prompted some to threaten him and his family, according to a report from the New York Times. But it is far from an isolated example of a judge prioritizing the welfare of the defendant over that of the victim in a sexual abuse case. Similar arguments were made on behalf of Brock Turner, the former Stanford swimmer who was sentenced to just six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman by a dumpster; Aaron Persky, the judge who sentenced Turner, cited the fact that Turner would “not be a danger to others” and his concern that “a prison sentence would have a severe impact” on him when justifying his light sentence. (Persky was later recalled by outraged California voters.) Similarly, last year Judge Stephen Ehlke sentenced Alec Cook, a man accused of sexually assaulting, stalking, and choking multiple female students, to only three years in prison, citing his lack of criminal record; during sentencing, Ehlke addressed one of his victims in court by saying “Please, continue to be kind — I’m sorry — and positive.”
When you hear enough of these stories, a pattern tends to emerge. The accused are usually young. They are usually white, a fact that was particularly relevant in the wake of Ehlke’s verdict, as one black lawmaker pointed out that the judge had sentenced a 16-year-old black offender to 20 years in prison before sentencing Cook. And they are usually middle-class and fairly well-educated, to enough of a degree that it’s not impossible to imagine the (usually white, usually male, usually well-educated) judges perhaps seeing a younger version of themselves taking the stand. But in justifying these light sentences, judges rarely cite these factors. Instead, they point to the defendant’s lack of criminal record, or their sterling grades, or their history of volunteer work within the community. They express their concern over the impact a lengthy prison sentence would have on these young men’s delicate characters, and they place the burden solely on the accusers to recuperate from the trauma of their assault, urging them to stay kind, stay strong, stay positive. Above all else, they express a desire to protect the defendant’s potential.
The idea of young men like the Glen Ridge football players or Turner or the 16-year-old defendant in Troiano’s case having “potential” is a fascinating one. One wonders what sort of potential one would see in a young man who films himself having sex with an intoxicated girl and brags about raping her to his friends, other than the potential to harm other young women. One wonders what sort of potential one would see in a young man who has the presence of mind to cover a baseball bat with a plastic baggie and Vaseline before using it to penetrate an intellectually impaired girl, other than the potential to commit more violent sexual crimes. One wonders what sort of potential is so great, so fragile, so worthy of protection, that it would be prioritized over that of the young woman who has survived a violent sexual assault. One wonders what that young woman could have accomplished, had she not been told at an early age that her welfare and her future prospects were secondary to those of her assailant. One wonders just how much a good boy’s potential is really worth, when it so clearly comes at the expense of that of the young woman he has harmed.
In expressing his desire to preserve the reputation of the alleged 16-year-old assailant, Troiano got his wish; his name is not public. He will not forever have to answer to prospective employers and girlfriends who Google him and look at the results with horror, wondering how on Earth such a nice boy could have been capable of inflicting such harm. The guys of Glen Ridge, however, were not spared this fate. Their names are a matter of public record, and their crimes will follow them around for the rest of their lives. Three of the boys — brothers Kevin and Kyle Scherzer, and Christopher Archer — were convicted on first-degree aggravated sexual charges and sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in prison, ultimately only serving about half of that time; a fourth, Bryant Grober, on whom the victim reportedly had a crush, and was used by the other boys as bait to lure her into the basement, was found guilty of a single count of conspiracy.
As part of their sentences, the Scherzers and Archer were required to register for a state sex offender database. It’s easy to find their names and faces online, their tired, lined, unshaven faces a far cry from those of the clean-cut, handsome young white men pictured emerging from the courthouse in 1989. Maybe some would compare that photo to the mugshots of the now-middle-aged Glen Ridge rapists and see a tale of woe, a tale of lost potential. But if there is anything to be learned from Glen Ridge, perhaps it’s that these boys — who not only bragged about penetrating an intellectually disabled girl with a baseball bat, but were so unrepentant that they reportedly tried to do it again the day afterwards — and those like them, probably never had all that much potential to begin with.
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I may be crazy, bu I'm amazed at how much that guy resembles Paul Bernardo, who with his wife's help kidnapped, kept as sex slaves, raped and murdered lovely innocent young teenage girls in Ontario. He is a monster - he even raped and murdered his wife's pre-teen sister WITH HIS WIFE'S HELP - She was a monster too, and was imprisoned for many years .
I'm trying to find the words to express what I'm thinking right now. The best I can come up with is that I don't think there is a steam-roller heavy enough for Judge James Troiano.
As for the prick from 'a good family', I say put his name out for all to see. Since he was so proud of his performance, he and his family should get all the attention they deserve.
The good news is that the rapist doesn't have to worry about his future. I'm absolutely certain Brett Kavanaugh will have some great advice for him.
The real issue here is that he Judge decided to act as a trier of fact when his ONLY job was to review the involuntary waiver motion by the Prosecution. The state has specific standards that must be met by the Prosecution and the Judge is only there to ensure that the Prosecution meets that standard. They are NOT there to decide the merits of the underlying case.
Here is what this pig of a Judge stated during the waiver hearing:
Oh and if THAT isn't bad enough, here is a FACT stated in the opinion:
So the 'first investigator' got clearance from his sergeant to DESTROY evidence.
At this point it's unclear whether the girls family was aware of the actual content of the video. It's clear that the girl does NOT clearly remember the events. So ya, they wanted the video deleted but the police should NOT have allowed that to happen without securing an evidentiary copy.
Here's the kicker, the pig of a Judge actually said:
What the actual fuck!
Oh and BTW, NJ is looking at another pig Judge doing the same crap.
I imagine this scumbag judge was a privileged teen himself. I have to wonder how many women he's raped?
good questioned I always take a step back on rape cases because many people have been accused when they didnt do anything wrong. But this looks pretty open and shut