No jail time, ten years probation, and the lowest level sex offender designation. That’s the sentence handed out to Watertown, New York’s 26-year-old Shane M. Piche for raping a 14-year-old girl in his home after serving her alcohol. Piche had pled guilty to third degree rape of a 14-year-old girl he met as her school bus driver. Judge James P. McClusky said the reasoning for the low-level sex offender classification was due to the fact that Piche did not have an arrest record and there was only one victim.
The prosecutor had asked for a level 2 sex offender designation which would have placed Piche on the sex offender registry for life—as it stands now, Piche will be registered for the next 20 years. In choosing level 1 for Piche, Judge McClusky was saying that he did not believe Piche was a risk to reoffend. However, Piche was also ordered not to be left alone with anyone under the age of 17-years old, which is a strange thing to order if you do not think someone is a risk of offending again.
According to the Watertown Daily Times, Piche will have to pay over $1,000 in court and sex registry fees. The girl’s mother wrote a statement that was given to 7 News Fox 28 saying that, "I wish Shane Piche would have received time in jail for the harm he caused to my child. He took something from my daughter she will never get back and has caused her to struggle with depression and anxiety."
Arguing that a single rape isn’t as bad as multiple rapes is not a meaningful argument unless you are deciding between something more than jail time and jail time. To put some of this into another perspective, if you are a black male teen in Michigan, and you and your high school girlfriend send nude photos back and forth to each other, you could be subject to 10 years in prison.