A petition to remove an Oklahoma judge who sentenced a convicted child rapist to 15 years of probation is gaining serious momentum online.
Benjamin Lawrence Petty, 36, was recently handed the lenient sentence by Judge Wallace Coppedge for a crime he committed while working as a cook at Falls Creek church camp in June 2016.
Petty, who is blind, allegedly told his 13-year-old victim that he
wanted to show her a new type of device he brought to the camp to lure
the young girl into his cabin.
Petty then "closed the door to his bedroom, tied [the victim's] hands
behind her back, pulled down her jeans, pushed her face down on his
bed, and violently raped and sodomized her," court records show.
Petty was arrested following the attack and charged with forcible
sodomy, first-degree rape and rape by instrumentation, all three of
which he pleaded guilty to in January 2018.
Despite the guilty plea, Judge Coppedge sentenced Petty to just 15 years probation, partially due to his physical disability.
While Petty will have to wear a GPS ankle monitor for two years and
register as an aggravated sex offender, he won’t serve any time behind
bars for his crime unless he violates that probation, a sentence which
has sparked outrage.
In response to the case, Julie Mastrine, a Care2 spokesperson, said
her team decided to start a petition to have Judge Coppedge removed from
his bench.
"This was one of those kinds of outrageous stories where we thought
people are clearly angry about this, so we should get a petition out,"
Mastrine told KFOR.
"It really just shows you that people all over the world want to see
justice. Even if it’s not an issue that’s directly tied to their
community, they still have big hearts."
Currently, Mastrine's petition has received over 61,000 signatures and is less than 4,000 away from its goal of 65,000.
However, legal expert Joi Miskel told KFOR that takes much more than a widely-supported petition to get a judge ousted from his bench.
"It’s all well and good to file a petition online to get kind of, get
some movement going," Miskel told the station. "It's not that easy just
to snap your fingers and remove a judge. There's a lot more to it."
Miskel said that in order to get a judge removed, a complaint has to
be filed with the state's council on judicial complaints. From there, an
investigator will look into the claims and proceed to make
recommendations to several different entities, including the state's
Supreme Court.
While Miskel said that she does not personally agree with the
sentence, she said it's rare for a judge to go against a plea deal when
all parties are in agreement.
"In a sense, he was just doing
his job," she sad. "He was going along with what the state and defense
agreed upon. However, I think people are upset about the sentence
itself. And, he didn't determine that sentence. That was the state of
Oklahoma."
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