On August 26, 2013, in a courtroom in Billings, Montana, a judge named G. Todd Baugh sentenced a 54-year-old high school teacher named Stacey Rambold to 15 years in the Montana State Prison — with all but 31 days suspended. Rambold had been convicted of sexual intercourse without consent. His victim was Cherice Moralez, a student in his business class at Billings Senior High School. She had been fourteen years old when the abuse began. She had been a child.

Thirty-one days. One month in the county jail, and Rambold would walk free. No registration as a sex offender was required under the terms as initially structured. No substantial prison term. No consequence proportionate to the crime of an adult authority figure systematically sexually abusing a child in his care.

But the sentence was not the worst of what Judge Baugh said that day. After imposing it, he turned to address the courtroom — and he explained himself.

Cherice Moralez, he said, had been “older than her chronological age.” She had been “as much in control of the situation” as Stacey Rambold. She was, Baugh suggested, “a troubled youth” whose conduct had contributed to the circumstances of her own rape.

Cherice Moralez was not in the courtroom to hear any of this. She had died by suicide in February 2010, at the age of sixteen, before the case against Rambold went to trial. She had been a child who was abused by her teacher, who reported that abuse, who entered the criminal justice system as a victim seeking something that resembled accountability, and who died before the system could be bothered to deliver it. Judge Baugh did not mention this when he described her as being “in control.”

The national reaction to Baugh's sentence and comments was immediate and overwhelming. Petitions demanding his resignation gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures within days. Protests gathered outside the Yellowstone County courthouse. Legal commentators, advocacy groups, and elected officials across the political spectrum condemned the sentence as an affront to the basic principle that a child cannot consent to sexual abuse by an adult, and that a child victim's perceived maturity is legally irrelevant to the commission of the crime.

What followed over the next two years — the disciplinary proceedings, the Montana Supreme Court's response, the ultimate disposition of Rambold's case — is the story of a system confronting a moment of profound public reckoning and finding, ultimately, the minimum possible response that would allow the machinery of judicial self-protection to keep running.

Cherice Moralez: The Child the System Failed Before It Failed Her Again

To understand the full scope of what Judge Baugh's sentence represented, it is necessary to understand what Cherice Moralez had already been through before she died and before Stacey Rambold ever stood in a courtroom.

Cherice was a student at Billings Senior High School when Rambold — her teacher — began a sexual relationship with her in 2007. She was fourteen. He was fifty. The relationship, which the criminal justice system would ultimately characterize as rape under Montana law, continued over a period of time and involved multiple incidents of sexual contact. According to accounts from those who knew her, Cherice was a bright, complex young woman who was dealing with family difficulties and who found in Rambold a figure of authority and apparent support. What she could not have fully understood — because she was fourteen, and because the law correctly recognizes that fourteen-year-olds lack the legal and psychological capacity to consent to sexual contact with adults in positions of authority over them — was that she was being exploited.

The case against Rambold was originally filed in 2008. Then it stalled. Then it stalled again. The case that should have been resolved within a year or two of its filing spent years moving through the pretrial stages, with Rambold's attorneys raising challenges, with continuances granted, with the machinery of the criminal court grinding at the pace of institutional process rather than at any pace that would have felt, to a teenage girl who had reported her teacher's abuse of her, like a system that understood the urgency of her situation.

In February 2010, Cherice Moralez died by suicide. She was sixteen years old. The case against Rambold did not die with her. But with the victim unavailable to testify — and with the evidentiary complications that her death created for the prosecution — the case took yet another turn. In 2010, Rambold entered a deferred prosecution agreement: the charges would be deferred while he completed a sex offender treatment program. If he completed the program successfully and violated no other conditions, the charges could be dismissed.

This was not, in itself, an unusual disposition for a first-time offender in a difficult-to-try case where the key witness had died. Deferred prosecution agreements are a legitimate tool of criminal justice, appropriately applied in many circumstances. What happened next, however, was not appropriate. Rambold violated multiple conditions of his treatment program — including having unsupervised contact with minors — and the deferred prosecution was revoked. The case was reinstated. And Rambold, now facing prosecution years after the original charges, pleaded guilty to one count of sexual intercourse without consent in 2013.

He pleaded guilty to raping a child. The child was dead. The conviction was, in some sense, a posthumous vindication of what Cherice had reported six years before her case was finally resolved. And then G. Todd Baugh sentenced him to 31 days.

The Sentence and the Remarks: What the Judge Actually Said

The sentencing hearing on August 26, 2013 was attended by Cherice's mother, Auliea Hanlon, who had remained a fierce advocate for accountability in her daughter's case throughout the years of delays and the deferred prosecution and the revocation proceedings. She had come to hear a sentence that she hoped would reflect some measure of the gravity of what Rambold had done to her daughter and of the loss that Cherice's death had inflicted on her family.

What she heard instead was Judge Baugh impose 31 days and explain why.

The judge's explanation, as reported verbatim by journalists present in the courtroom, was a textbook recitation of the most discredited myths of rape apologetics, delivered from a judicial bench with the full authority of the state behind it. Cherice, Baugh said, had been “older than her chronological age.” She had been “as much in control of the situation” as Rambold. She was a “troubled youth.” The implication was unmistakable: whatever happened between a fifty-year-old teacher and his fourteen-year-old student had not been the kind of rape that warranted a serious sentence, because the child bore some measure of responsibility for her own victimization.

Under Montana law, a person under the age of sixteen cannot legally consent to sexual intercourse with an adult. This is not a gray area. It is not subject to judicial discretion based on the judge's personal assessment of the maturity of the minor involved. A fourteen-year-old child does not become legally capable of consenting to sex with her teacher because a judge decides she seemed sophisticated. The concept of “older than her chronological age” has no legal relevance whatsoever to the elements of the crime of sexual intercourse without consent. Baugh's remarks were not merely offensive in a social sense; they were legally wrong, factually baseless, and reflective of a judicial philosophy that substituted personal prejudice for the law the judge was sworn to apply.

Auliea Hanlon's response, delivered to reporters outside the courthouse, was direct: “My daughter wasn't even old enough to get a driver's license. How was she ‘in control'?” It was the response that anyone with a clear view of the facts would have given. It should not have been necessary to say it.

Baugh, facing the explosion of public condemnation that followed, initially attempted to defend and then partially walk back his remarks. He said he had “misspoke” about the victim being “in control.” He issued a partial apology that satisfied essentially no one — because the problem was not that he had chosen the wrong words. The problem was that his remarks accurately reflected the reasoning that had produced the 31-day sentence, and no amount of verbal revision could change what his sentence had already communicated about his view of Cherice Moralez and of the crime committed against her.

“Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”

The Legal Problem: A Sentence That Was Illegal on Its Face

The public outrage at Baugh's sentence focused, understandably, on the moral obscenity of blaming a child rape victim from the bench. But there was a more technical dimension to the problem that would prove to be the path through which the Montana Supreme Court could intervene: the sentence was not merely unjust. It was illegal.

Montana Code Annotated § 45-5-503(3) provides that for a first-time offender convicted of sexual intercourse without consent, the court shall impose a sentence of not less than two years in the state prison. The statute uses mandatory language. The minimum sentence for Rambold's crime, under the law that Judge Baugh was required to apply, was two years. Not 31 days. Not a month. Two years in the Montana State Prison, as a floor below which the court had no discretion to go.

Baugh had apparently relied on a statutory provision allowing for suspension of sentence in cases where the defendant had completed a sexual offender treatment program — a provision that the prosecution contended did not apply to this case, given that Rambold's treatment program had been revoked due to his violations. Whether or not the suspension provision could have applied in some interpretation of the statute, the 31-day term was almost certainly below the mandatory minimum regardless.

The Yellowstone County Attorney's office appealed the sentence to the Montana Supreme Court. The appeal raised both the illegal-sentence argument and the broader question of whether Baugh's reasoning — including his victim-blaming remarks — constituted reversible error in the sentencing proceeding.

The Montana Supreme Court acted with relative speed compared to most appellate proceedings. In April 2014, the Court issued its ruling: the 31-day sentence was illegal. The mandatory minimum applied. The case was remanded for resentencing before a different judge. The Court's opinion did not need to — and did not — directly address Baugh's remarks about the victim's maturity and control, because the illegality of the sentence provided sufficient independent grounds for reversal. The outcome Baugh had sought to achieve was undone.

At resentencing before Judge Randal Spargo in 2014, Rambold received ten years in the Montana State Prison with all but four suspended. He was required to register as a sex offender. He served approximately fourteen months in custody and was released in 2015. The sentence remained, in the view of many advocates, inadequate for the crime of repeatedly raping a child. But it was, at minimum, a sentence that bore some relationship to the mandatory minimums the legislature had established and to the gravity of the offense the defendant had admitted.

The Judicial Discipline Process: Censure and a Voluntary Exit

The formal accountability process for Judge Baugh's conduct proceeded in parallel with the appellate proceedings against Rambold's sentence. The Montana Judicial Standards Commission — the body that investigates complaints against Montana judges and recommends discipline to the Montana Supreme Court — received a flood of complaints after the August 2013 sentencing. The Commission investigated.

In December 2013, the Judicial Standards Commission filed formal charges against Baugh, alleging that his remarks about the victim had violated the Montana Code of Judicial Conduct by demeaning and disparaging the victim of a crime in open court. The Commission's charges focused on the remarks themselves rather than on the illegal-sentence question, which was being handled through the appellate process.

Baugh contested the charges, arguing that his remarks had been mischaracterized and that the disciplinary proceedings violated his First Amendment rights. The argument that a judge's in-court statements about a crime victim are protected constitutional speech had no serious legal foundation — judicial speech in the context of sentencing proceedings is subject to the standards of judicial conduct codes precisely because it is exercise of judicial power, not protected private expression — but it served its purpose of extending the proceedings and delaying resolution.

In January 2015, before the disciplinary proceedings against him could reach a final determination by the Montana Supreme Court, Baugh voluntarily retired from the bench. His retirement mooted the disciplinary proceedings in their most consequential form — a sanction of suspension or removal from a bench he no longer occupied would have been largely symbolic. The Commission issued a formal censure — a written condemnation of his conduct that became part of the public record of his judicial career. Baugh served no suspension. He was not removed. He was not fined. He retired, with his full judicial pension intact, having faced no consequence more serious than a letter of censure that he would never have to act on.

This was, by the standards of the American judicial discipline system, considered a significant accountability outcome. That it was considered significant is its own indictment.

Victim Blaming from the Bench: A Documented Pattern

The temptation to treat G. Todd Baugh as an outlier — a uniquely retrograde judicial figure whose views on rape and consent were so far outside the mainstream as to be incomprehensible — must be resisted. His remarks were extreme in their public expression and in the platform from which they were delivered. The underlying attitudes they reflected are not rare in the American judiciary.

The documented history of judicial commentary in sexual assault cases includes a sustained pattern of victim-blaming, minimization of harm, and implicit (and sometimes explicit) assignment of responsibility to victims for their own assaults. The pattern is sufficiently well-documented that it has been the subject of empirical research, advocacy campaigns, and legislative reform efforts in multiple states.

In Canada, Justice Robin Camp — a federal court judge — was the subject of a 2016 judicial conduct inquiry after his 2014 acquittal of a sexual assault defendant, during which he asked the complainant why she “couldn't just keep her knees together” and whether she had “skirt[ed] around the act,” and told her that “pain and sex sometimes go together.” Camp was removed from the federal bench in 2017. His case received international attention because the transcript of his questioning was so extraordinarily documented and specific. But veteran sex assault prosecutors and advocates who reviewed the Canadian inquiry noted that the attitudes Camp expressed were not unusual in their experience — what was unusual was the availability of a verbatim transcript that made denial impossible.

In the United States, the problem runs deep enough that multiple states have enacted judicial education requirements specifically addressing rape myth awareness and the legal irrelevance of a victim's prior sexual history, clothing, intoxication, or perceived maturity to the legal elements of sexual assault crimes. These requirements exist because legislators reviewing judicial conduct in sexual assault cases determined that mandatory education was necessary. The necessity of the education reflects the existence of the problem.

The research literature on this phenomenon is extensive. Studies of sentencing in sexual assault cases have consistently found that judicial perceptions of victim credibility, victim behavior, and victim-offender relationship significantly affect sentencing outcomes in ways that are not legally authorized. A judge who believes, however unconsciously, that a particular victim “contributed” to her assault will impose a shorter sentence on the offender. That shorter sentence is not the product of applying the law; it is the product of applying a belief system that the law explicitly rejects. And because sentencing discretion is broad, and because appellate review of sentencing decisions is highly deferential to trial courts except in cases of clear legal error, those shorter sentences are often unreviewable.

Baugh's case was reviewable because his sentence was not just unjust — it was illegal. The mandatory minimum provision gave the Montana Supreme Court the hook it needed. In most cases involving victim-blaming judicial attitudes expressed in sentencing remarks, no such hook exists. The sentence is within the permissible range. The remarks are offensive but not independently reviewable. The victim has no remedy. The judge faces no consequence. The pattern continues.

“The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending have enslaved the people.”

The Pension Question: Accountability That Stops at the Retirement Door

When G. Todd Baugh retired in January 2015, he took his judicial pension with him. The State of Montana continued to send him monthly retirement payments funded by Montana taxpayers, in recognition of his years of service as a judge — years that included the sentencing hearing at which he told the world that a fourteen-year-old rape victim had been as much in control of her assault as the adult teacher who committed it.

The pension question is not merely symbolic. It goes to the heart of what accountability means when judicial discipline systems are structured in ways that systematically favor retirement over removal. In Montana, as in most states, a judge who retires before a disciplinary proceeding reaches its conclusion deprives the proceeding of most of its practical effect. A censure issued to a retired judge carries no suspension of salary, no impact on current judicial authority, and — critically — no effect on pension benefits that have already vested.

The incentive structure this creates is perverse: a judge facing serious disciplinary charges for conduct that might warrant removal is systematically better off retiring than fighting the charges to a final determination. Retirement preserves the pension. Retirement moots the disciplinary sanction. Retirement allows the judge to exit the public eye while the formal process dissipates. The disciplinary system, in effect, rewards the corrupt or misconducting judge who retires early with a softer outcome than the judge who stays and contests the charges — and softer than the outcome available to the public if the charges had been fully litigated.

This structural flaw is not unique to Montana. It is endemic to judicial discipline systems across the country. The reform that would address it — allowing disciplinary proceedings to continue through completion and to affect pension benefits even after retirement — has been proposed in multiple states and has largely been defeated by the organized opposition of judicial associations who understand that the current structure protects their members.

Mark Fuller, the federal district judge in Alabama who was recorded by a hotel security camera assaulting his wife in a hotel room in 2014, resigned from the federal bench before the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment proceedings could reach a vote — and retained his full federal judicial pension. Alex Kozinski, the Ninth Circuit Chief Judge who was found to have subjected law clerks and female lawyers appearing before him to years of sexual harassment, retired before the Judicial Council's investigation could be completed — and retained his full pension. The pattern is consistent: judicial misconduct, significant enough to trigger formal proceedings, handled through retirement that neutralizes the proceeding and preserves the benefit.

G. Todd Baugh belongs to this company. His censure is a matter of public record. His pension was unaffected. Cherice Moralez is dead. Rambold served fourteen months.

The Mandatory Minimum That Was Never Mandatory: Judicial Evasion of Statutory Limits

The Montana Supreme Court found that Baugh's 31-day sentence was illegal because it fell below the two-year mandatory minimum established by Montana Code Annotated § 45-5-503(3). This finding raises a question that the appellate opinion did not fully address: how did a judge with decades of experience on the Montana bench impose a sentence that was illegal on its face?

There are two possible answers, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is that Baugh made an error of statutory interpretation — that he genuinely believed the suspension provision available for defendants who had completed treatment programs could reduce the minimum below the statutory floor. This explanation requires believing that a judge who had been on the bench for decades, sentencing criminal defendants, was unaware of a clear mandatory minimum that applied to the most serious category of offense on his docket. It is not impossible. Judges make errors of law. But the combination of the erroneous legal conclusion with the victim-blaming remarks strongly suggests that the legal error was not independent of the judge's underlying attitude about the offense and the victim.

The second explanation is more troubling: that Baugh was aware of the mandatory minimum and chose to impose the sentence he wished to impose anyway, relying on the assumption that the prosecution would not appeal, or that the appeal would not succeed, or that the practical cost of fighting the sentence was too high for the victim's family. This explanation — that a judge can impose an illegal sentence with relative confidence that the accountability mechanisms will not catch it — is well-supported by the broader history of judicial sentencing in sexual assault cases. Mandatory minimums in rape cases are, in practice, routinely circumvented through plea negotiations, through charge reduction, and through judicial interpretation of suspended sentence provisions. The Baugh case was unusual not because he circumvented a mandatory minimum but because he did it so flagrantly, with such public expression of his reasoning, that an appeal became not only possible but politically inevitable.

The lesson that prosecutors, advocates, and appellate courts should take from the Baugh case is that the sentencing record matters enormously. When a judge explains a sentence in terms that reveal legally impermissible reasoning — as Baugh did when he attributed the victim's rape to her own maturity and control — those remarks create the evidentiary foundation for an appeal that challenges not just the sentence's compliance with mandatory minimums but the integrity of the sentencing process itself. In jurisdictions where the sentencing record is less complete — where judges do not explain their reasoning, or where courtrooms do not have reliable transcription — the same legally impermissible reasoning can produce sentences that are never challenged because the evidence of the flaw in the process is never preserved.

Auliea Hanlon and the Fight That Outlasted the System's Interest

Through all of it — the years of pretrial delays, her daughter's death, the deferred prosecution, the revocation proceedings, the sentencing, Baugh's remarks, the national outcry, the appeal, the resentencing, the disciplinary proceedings — Auliea Hanlon continued to fight.

She fought because no one else was going to fight for Cherice. Not the system that had delayed the case for years while her daughter was alive. Not the system that had offered Rambold a deferred prosecution that he then violated. Not the judge who had decided, from the bench, that her daughter had been “in control” of her own rape. The system's interest in Cherice Moralez's case had always been instrumental and limited — she was a necessary witness until she wasn't, a victim until the case became politically inconvenient, a grievance until the media moved on.

Auliea's fight produced concrete results. Her public statements, her attendance at hearings, her willingness to speak to the media about what the system had done to her family — these kept the pressure on the appellate courts and the disciplinary commission at moments when the institutional tendency would have been to allow the Baugh matter to fade into administrative resolution. The Montana Supreme Court's decision to remand for resentencing was the right legal outcome; it was also a decision made in the full awareness of public attention that Auliea Hanlon had helped sustain.

What she could not achieve, through any amount of advocacy, was a system that would give her daughter back, or one that would sentence Rambold to the kind of punishment that reflected the actual harm of repeated sexual assault on a child who subsequently died. The ten-year sentence with all but four suspended was not justice. It was a correction of an obvious legal error. The difference between those two things is the difference between what the legal system promises and what it delivers.

The National Landscape: How Sexual Assault Sentencing Fails Victims Systemically

The Baugh case focused national attention on Montana's sentencing practices in sexual assault cases. That attention was appropriate. It was also incomplete, because the failures the Baugh case illustrated were not peculiar to Montana.

A 2014 analysis by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) found that out of every 1,000 sexual assaults reported in the United States, approximately 310 are reported to police; approximately 57 result in arrest; approximately 11 are referred for prosecution; approximately 7 result in a felony conviction; and approximately 6 result in incarceration of the perpetrator. Of those incarcerated, the average sentence for rape across all jurisdictions is approximately eight to nine years, with the median actual time served substantially lower due to parole and good-time provisions.

The gap between sexual assault as a lived reality — one of the most prevalent violent crimes in America, with lifetime victimization rates that affect approximately one in six women — and sexual assault as a matter addressed by the criminal justice system is one of the most profound institutional failures in American law. The reasons for this gap are multiple and documented: low reporting rates driven by victim fear of retraumatization and disbelief; investigative failures in the processing of rape kits (as many as 100,000 of which were sitting untested in evidence storage in jurisdictions across the country as of the mid-2010s); prosecutorial reluctance to bring cases with credibility challenges; and sentencing disparities that reflect the survival of rape myths in the judicial decision-making process.

Baugh's case was extreme because he said the quiet part loud. The attitudes he expressed openly from the bench are attitudes that operate, more quietly, throughout the system — in the decision of whether to charge, in the plea negotiation, in the sentence recommendation, and in the judicial discretion that determines how much of a sentence is actually served. The advocacy focus on individual egregious cases like Baugh's is valuable for raising public awareness but risks obscuring the systemic nature of the failure. Removing one judge who expresses retrograde views in public does not address the judges who hold the same views and express them only in their sentencing decisions.

Reform Blueprint: What Must Change to Protect Sexual Assault Victims from the System That Fails Them

The Baugh case, and the broader pattern of judicial and prosecutorial failure it represents, points toward specific, achievable reforms that would reduce the frequency of victim-blaming sentencing and improve accountability when it occurs:

1. Mandatory verbatim transcription of all sexual assault sentencing hearings, with automatic appellate review when the sentence is below the statutory maximum by more than a defined threshold. The Baugh case was reversed because his remarks created a clear evidentiary record of legally impermissible reasoning. Most victim-blaming sentencing decisions leave no such record, because the judge's oral reasoning is not transcribed or because the reasoning is expressed implicitly through the sentence rather than articulated explicitly. Mandatory transcription of sentencing hearings in sexual assault cases, combined with automatic review when sentences are substantially below statutory maximums, would create both a record and a mechanism for identifying sentencing decisions driven by impermissible reasoning. The burden on appellate courts would be manageable if limited to cases where the sentence is a specified percentage below the maximum or below any applicable guideline range.
2. Establish minimum mandatory judicial education requirements on rape myths and consent law, with biennial recertification, as a condition of judicial service in criminal courts. Multiple states have enacted judicial education requirements following sexual assault sentencing scandals. These requirements should be uniform, mandatory, subject to verified completion, and specific in their content: they must address the legal irrelevance of victim behavior, clothing, intoxication, prior sexual history, and perceived maturity to the elements of sexual assault offenses; the neurobiological responses to trauma that affect victim behavior during and after assault; and the documented prevalence of rape myths in judicial decision-making. Judges who fail to complete the required education should be subject to a prohibition on presiding over sexual assault cases until completion is verified.
3. Reform judicial disciplinary systems to allow proceedings to continue to final determination regardless of the judge's retirement, with pension consequences available as sanctions. The structural incentive that rewards judicial misconduct with retirement as an exit from accountability must be eliminated. State legislatures should amend their judicial retirement statutes to provide that a judge who retires while formal disciplinary proceedings are pending does not thereby moot those proceedings; that the commission's findings and the Supreme Court's sanctions may be issued against a retired judge; and that those sanctions may include reduction or forfeiture of pension benefits in cases involving findings of serious misconduct. The availability of pension consequences as a disciplinary sanction would fundamentally change the calculus of retirement-as-escape and ensure that the public record of a judge's misconduct is complete regardless of when the judge leaves office.
4. Create a victim's right of appeal from sentences in sexual assault cases that fall below mandatory minimums or that are accompanied by findings of legally impermissible reasoning. Under current law in most states, the prosecution may appeal an illegal sentence but the victim has no independent right of appeal from a sentencing decision. Giving victims an independent right of appeal — with the assistance of state-appointed counsel if necessary — would provide a check on prosecutorial decisions not to appeal inadequate sentences, and would ensure that the victim's interest in a sentence consistent with the law is represented before the appellate court even when prosecutorial priorities or relationships might otherwise counsel against appeal.
5. Require disclosure of judicial disciplinary history in judicial election materials and on state judiciary websites. G. Todd Baugh's censure became a matter of public record. But the systems by which judicial disciplinary records are accessible to the public vary widely across states, and few voters have any practical mechanism for reviewing a judge's disciplinary history before voting. State judiciaries should maintain publicly accessible, easily searchable databases of judicial disciplinary actions — censures, reprimands, suspensions, and removals — and should be required to display this information on candidate-profile pages in judicial election contexts. Transparency about judicial misconduct is a precondition of meaningful democratic accountability in jurisdictions with elected judiciaries.
6. Require mandatory reporting to judicial conduct commissions when prosecutorial offices identify sentencing decisions that appear to reflect legally impermissible reasoning. The Yellowstone County Attorney's office appealed Baugh's sentence — the right decision, ultimately vindicated by the Montana Supreme Court. But the decision to appeal required affirmative action by the prosecution in circumstances where the prosecution and the judiciary maintain ongoing working relationships that create systemic disincentives to challenge judicial decisions. Mandatory reporting — requiring prosecutorial offices to flag sentencing decisions that appear to reflect legally impermissible reasoning to the judicial conduct commission, separate from any appellate decision — would create an independent accountability track that does not depend on prosecutorial willingness to challenge a judge before whom they regularly appear.
7. Eliminate deferred prosecution for adult sexual offenders where the victim was a minor under the age of consent. Rambold received a deferred prosecution agreement that he then violated, causing years of additional delay before the case was finally resolved — years during which Cherice Moralez died. Deferred prosecution is an appropriate tool for many categories of offense. For adults who have been charged with sexual assault of a child under the age of consent, where the power differential is inherent and where the harm to the child is ongoing regardless of whether the offender completes a treatment program, deferred prosecution creates delay and uncertainty that typically harms the victim more than it benefits the interests of justice. The statutory availability of deferred prosecution for this category of offense should be eliminated.

The Name That Must Be Said

In the media coverage of the Baugh sentencing scandal, there was a tendency — encouraged by some victim advocacy groups and contested by others — to avoid naming Cherice Moralez, in deference to the convention that sexual assault victims' names should not be published without their consent. Cherice was dead. She had no ability to consent or withhold consent to the use of her name. Her family had chosen to speak publicly about her case. Her mother used her name in every public statement she made.

This article uses her name because she deserves to be more than “the victim.” She was Cherice Moralez. She was a fourteen-year-old girl who was raped by her teacher, who had the courage to report what happened to her, who entered a system that took years to address her case, who died at sixteen before the system could be bothered to finish what she had started, and whose name Judge Baugh did not use when he described her — from the bench, with the authority of the state — as a child who had been in control of her own rape.

She was Cherice Moralez. The system failed her. The system is still failing children like her, in courtrooms across the country, in sentences that are never appealed and remarks that are never transcribed and attitudes that are never examined because no one made enough public noise about them to force accountability into the room.

Cherice's mother kept making noise. It was not enough to save her daughter. It was enough to force a partial correction of an illegal sentence and a formal censure of the judge who had imposed it. It was enough to make the Baugh case a reference point that anyone who cares about judicial accountability in sexual assault cases can cite when they need to explain why the system needs structural reform, not just better individual judges.

That is a form of legacy. It is not the form a mother deserves. It is what the system made possible, and what the reformers who come after her can build on, if they choose to build rather than to wait for the next Cherice Moralez to make the next judge's name into the next symbol of how far the system has left to go.