It is well established that a judge cannot be impeached merely because of bad rulings. That precedent was essentially written in pigment in 1805, when Thomas Jefferson pressed for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase over his past work as a trial judge. However, Chase was acquitted on all charges, even though the Senate was dominated by Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. That case went a long way toward establishing the independence of the judiciary.
But one has to wonder—what to do when a judge makes a ruling that’s not just bad, but appears to breach every standard of decency that is known? That’s what may have happened in a Springfield, Missouri courtroom earlier this week. A man took an 11-year-old girl from nearby Republic to his apartment and had sex with her—and yet, is only getting probation.
Joseph Robert Meili, 22, was sentenced in Greene County Court on Friday after pleading guilty in March to third-degree child molestation as part of a plea deal.
In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to dismiss the child kidnapping and first-degree statutory rape charges he also faced.
Under Missouri law, third-degree child molestation is considered a class C felony punishable by up to three to 10 years in prison or a shorter term coupled with a $10,000 fine.
Prosecutors recommended Meili serve 120 days in a sex offender treatment program and up to seven years in prison. But Judge Calvin R. Holden sentenced him to just five years of supervised probation.
Meili will also have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. He was already getting the deal of a lifetime even before Holden pronounced phrase—no, not sentence. He faced up to life in prison if convicted on all three original charges; in Missouri, statutory rape of a child who is 12 or younger carries a minimum of 10 years in prison and a maximum of life. The girl later tested positive for chlamydia.
So how in the world did Holden even think letting Meili off with probation was at all acceptable? Well, this may have been a factor.
Meili told investigators that he had agreed to meet the girl because her profile said she was 18. His attorney, Scott Pierson, told HuffPost that the girl had reached out to his client online and “catfished” him by claiming to be older than she was.
This may also explain why prosecutors were so quick to agree to a deal. Apparently, concerns about making the girl testify and possibly revictimizing her were magnified by the prospect that Pierson could effectively put her on trial.
Baloney! Even if this girl lied about her age on her profile, there is no way in the world that any guy with an iota of decency wouldn’t have seen her and recognized she was way younger than she said she was. Meili had a chance to back out and walk away—and didn’t. And yet, prosecutors didn’t have the guts to take this to trial. Had they done so and it resulted in a hung jury, at least they would have done something.
The one person who could have stopped this travesty was Judge Holden. And yet, he not only didn’t do so, but made it worse. In so doing, he may have effectively engaged in victim-blaming from the bench. If so, this wasn’t just a bad ruling. This was a case of a judge using the power of his gavel to degrade a plaintiff.
Apparently this isn’t the first time that Holden has given wrist slaps to sex offenders. HuffPost detailed no fewer than three instances since 2016 in which he handed out phrases of probation to men who were either convicted at trial to particularly heinous rape charges or pleaded guilty. But his decision to hand Meili probation comes very close to the line between just a bad ruling and unethical conduct, and probably goes over it. After all, the only defensible reason for such a lenient sentence requires you to engage in victim-blaming.
Unless it would open a can of worms, we should be at least thinking about getting Holden impeached. After all, something is wrong if society cannot say that we cannot tolerate judges using the power of their office to degrade women.