He raped a 13-year-old girl.
Shawn Jordan, the former Rochester cop, the one who got to be a former cop by allegedly whacking off on Facebook Messenger in front of a 16-year-old girl while in uniform on duty in his blue and white.
That Shawn Jordan.
He raped a 13-year-old girl. At his house out in the country, getting his jollies.
He raped a 13-year-old girl, and yesterday he got probation.
Probation and 10 weekends in jail.
For raping a 13-year-old girl.
No tree, no rope, no uncles and cousins with baseball bats, no millstone around the neck and cast into the depths of the sea, no state prison, no nothing that looks like punishment.
While his victim’s mom begged he be sentenced to time behind bars.
He raped a 13-year-old girl and he got probation, because justice is blind, and because in Canandaigua yesterday it had its head up its ass.
Because in no way on any planet under any circumstances is probation and 10 weekends in jail anything like justice for raping a 13-year-old girl. That’s not a plea agreement, that’s a surrender. It might look good when you’re calculating conviction percentages, but only if you’re really, really drunk.
But that’s what he got, a punishment more in line with a first-time DUI or maybe a second-time shoplifting, and I mean shoplifting like putting an eyeliner in your purse without paying for it.
He raped a 13-year-old girl and he got probation and weekends. Don’t try that if you’re a black guy, because I don’t think it would work out quite the same way. He pled guilty to a crime that ought to put him in prison where Bubba can show him what it feels like, but instead he’s going to be mowing grass at the courthouse on Saturday mornings, unless he pisses off the deputies in which case he’ll be picking up litter on the side of Route 332.
Usually miscarriages of justice like this in New York come about because of stupid Democrat laws, but this one was the result of stupid Republican officials. The prosecutor who made this deal and the judge who went along with it are both good Republicans, and yesterday they failed.
That’s harsh, I know, and these are good people who have dedicated their lives to doing right and protecting victims. But he raped a 13-year-old, and they signed off on probation, and that will never, ever, ever be right.
Because it not only fails to achieve justice in the matter of this victim, it debases public confidence in the criminal justice system, it trivializes child rape, and it wastes an opportunity to potentially deter future child rapists. If the rationale for the TV cameras is that you didn’t want to put the victim on the stand, to avoid the emotional trauma, you’ve just told other pedophiles to rape kids too young to testify, and to do it in Ontario County.
And you’ve also just told everybody wearing a badge and carrying a gun that your version of “Law and Order” only includes the first half hour. They can investigate, but damned if you’re going to prosecute.
When you make a deal with the devil, you’re going to get burned.
And it is incomprehensible that in one courtroom in one day before one judge one rapist gets 20 years and another rapist gets 10 weekends. Everybody watching the 6 o’clock news knew that was wrong, but nobody in power in the Ontario County Courthouse did.
And people are pissed off, not because they don’t understand the law or the difficulties of prosecution, but because its their courtroom and their law and their daughter. And the narrative of New York lawlessness has taken one more despicable turn. It’s one thing not to be able to trust the Democrats in Albany, it’s another not to be able to trust the Republicans in Canandaigua.
There’s got to be a smell test, some simple threshold of common sense that tells you whether something is right or something is wrong. And if probation and weekends isn’t wrong for child rape, then maybe you need to venture back to the real world and take a refresher course.
The prosecution never should have made this deal. The judge never should have signed off on this deal.
Paperwork justice – closing a case and making a record in someone’s file somewhere – is not real justice. Real justice is punishment that fits the crime.
And probation and 10 weekends does not fit the crime.
And everyone who wasn’t the prosecutor or the judge knows that.