Judge admits he made mistake in sentencing Misty Roberts, who faced up to 17 years in prison after conviction
The former Louisiana mayor Misty Roberts has completed the 90-day jail sentence she received for raping a 16-year-old boy while still in elected office and been released from custody, according to state corrections records.
The 44-year-old finished her jail term on what was the Labor Day holiday in the US, one week after the judge who presided over her case rejected a request from prosecutors to force her to serve a harsher sentence.
Judge Kent Savoie nonetheless acknowledged in court he was mistaken to have based Roberts’ sentence off of a list of more than 30 cases that were resolved through plea deals, unlike her prosecution, which culminated in a jury trial and guilty verdict, the Louisiana news station KPLC reported.
“I asked someone to get me a list of cases similar,” Savoie was quoted as saying on 31 August. “I made an assumption, and that assumption was wrong.
But there are some mistakes egregious enough that it falls into reckless territory, and in a job where people’s lives hang in the balance - sometimes quite literally life or death - you can’t just get a mulligan for those mistakes. That’s a Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200 kind of mistake.
This isn’t an unusual standard, we do this for other important jobs like piloting or medicine; if your mistake was something reckless where it could be predicted something very bad could result, that’s often not just a firing, but actually losing the ability to practice that occupation anymore at all.
At first blush, this sounds more like a case of reckless behavior, not a simple mistake.