An eighteen-year-old man in Idaho was convicted of raping a fourteen-year-old girl, and he may get off way too easily. Cody Duane Scott Herrera starting conversing with the victim on Facebook, under the impression that she was sixteen, a year before the crime. The girl’s mother informed Herrera that her daughter was only fourteen and wasn’t allowed to see him after finding out about the relationship. That same night, Herrera snuck into the teenager’s room, taking her clothes off and proceeded to rape her even when she started crying and pleaded for him to stop, when all she really wanted was a movie date.
Now nineteen, the rapist was originally sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison by a judge in Twin Falls, but then gave him another option: probation which includes no sex until marriage. Herrera was placed in the state’s “rider” program, which means that he’d be sent to a correction facility for rigorous rehabilitation and the court would retain jurisdiction over the case. If the felon suitably finishes the program, the judge can choose to give him probation as opposed to prison. “If you’re ever on probation with this court, a condition of that will be you will not have sexual relations with anyone except who you’re married to, if you’re married,” Stoker, the judge, told him last month.
Prosecutors said that Herrera has also watched pornography depicting rape, had fantasizes about a thirteen-year-old, and has had thirty-four sexual partners at only nineteen. “It was his intent from the beginning to take what he wanted from my fourteen-year-old child — her virginity,” the victim’s mother told the court. “And he stayed around until he got it from her. Cody will never understand what he has done to our family. Cody robbed her of her innocence. He destroyed the child left in her. This can never be returned.”
Words can’t describe how unjustified the conclusion to this case is, not to mention the rhetoric the teenage girl’s mother has towards virginity and what that can do to one’s self-worth. Shaakirrah R Sanders, an associate professor at the University of Idaho said the probation condition might be unconstitutional therefore unenforceable. “I would suspect (a judge can’t do that),” Sanders said. “I think it infringes on his constitutional rights. I think if he appealed, he would win.”
