Yesterday, Kelly Shannon, a now-former minister and CCM singer from Warwick, Rhode Island; had the bill come due for her outrageous and horrifying exploitation of two innocent teenagers.
When the mother of a 13-year-old boy grew concerned about Shannon’s interactions with her son, she did what any mother would do—get a restraining order. In response, Shannon got the boy’s girlfriend to pose for pornographic pictures, then got her to falsely accuse him first of raping her, then violating an ensuing restraining order. The latter resulted in him being thrown in juvenile hall, then sent home on electronic monitoring.
Fortunately, Shannon’s hold on this girl was broken when the girl revealed Shannon had told her to make the whole thing up. Shannon was arrested in 2015. And yet, what did she get for it? She was allowed to plead no contest in return for a grand total of 18 months house arrest.
This is probably the most outrageous case I’ve seen to date of a disturbing trend. Those who commit some of the most heinous and depraved crimes wind up with staggeringly lenient sentences—at least in part in the name of preventing the victims from being further traumatized by having to go through a trial, one in which they would almost certainly have to testify.
I realize that in cases like these, prosecutors have to walk a tightrope. They want to get justice, but at the same time want to allow victims—especially ones who were minors at the time—a chance to heal. The Shannon case seems to be a textbook example of this. For one, it would have been really difficult to empanel a jury. Chances are that the trial would have had to be moved out of the Providence-Pawtucket-Warwick axis. The two victims have already had to wait over four years to go to trial.
But even allowing for that, this sentence is almost comical considering the damage Shannon did to two innocent kids. Besides getting this girl to pose for pornographic pictures, she fired the pictures off to several boys and forced her to engage in sexual activity. And she used her in a despicable attempt to get revenge on a boy who felt he was crossing too many lines for comfort. These two kids are going to need years of counseling.
It’s why the boy’s mother, Christy Gilroy, is dumbfounded at how lenient Shannon’s sentence was. In an interview with WJAR in Providence, Gilroy was particularly upset that a charge of possessing child porn was knocked down to a charge of fraudulent use of a computer to send and receive pictures—which meant she wouldn’t have to register as a sex offender. I don’t blame her. After all, she was caught red handed with several lewd pictures on her phone—pictures she sent to boys as part of her exploitation of that girl.
But even if you consider that knocking that charge down was the only way she’d accept a plea, how in the heck do you engage in such depraved behavior and escape jail time? I’m not at all comfortable with someone like this being out among us.
When I heard this, I immediately thought of several cases I highlighted a few years back on my personal blog of outrageously lenient sentences for people who seemingly deserved to do hard time. For instance, take an apartment manager in New Hampshire who knew the lead in one of his buildings far exceeded legal limits—and yet, never told his tenants. Instead, he cut-and-pasted tenant signatures onto federally required disclosure forms.
But that plan blew up in his face when a little girl died from eating paint chips—and it emerged that her mother could barely write English, so she couldn’t possibly have signed the forms. And yet, he only got 15 months in prison. By all rights, he should have gotten 15 years.
Until today, I didn’t think it was possible to get anywhere near as outrageous as that sentence. Well, I stand corrected. There is something wrong if, in the name of sparing victims the agony of a trial, we dole out sentences that are nowhere near credible.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is yet another indictment of mass incarceration. There is something wrong when picayune crimes merit long sentences, but truly heinous crimes result in slaps on the wrist—or in Shannon’s case, a tap on the wrist.