Todd Baugh is the district judge in Billings who sentenced a man to 15 years in prison with all but 30 days suspended for violating the terms of a plea bargain in a case devolving from a charge of statutory rape. Because the young woman involved committed suicide before she could testify against the 40-something school teacher who had intimate relations with her when she was just 14 years old, the original statutory rape case never came to trial.
Whether the former teacher will get more than 30 days is now in question, as the Yellowstone County Attorney has appealed the verdict, and Judge Baugh has scheduled a hearing because he now thinks he might have erred by not sticking the teacher behind bars for at least two years.
There’s no need to rehash the case here. Dahlia Lithwick’s post at Slate is the best legal analysis I’ve read. The worst is Betsy Karasik’s oped at the Washington Post, which is almost an argument that the statutory rape was a tryst no more illicit than Juliet’s entanglement with Romeo.
Marian Bradley, Kate Olp, and Sheena Rice, have written the best oped by Montanans that I’ve yet read. Rice is a community organizer, one of the organizers of the hugely successful rally in Billings protesting the 30 days behind bars, and a blogger at Intelligent Discontent. They generously submitted their oped, Billings will not stand for victim blaming, to Flathead Memo, and I’ve published it on its own page.
My initial impression was that 71-year-old Judge Baugh was elected to his position once too often, and nothing I’ve learned since then has caused me to change my mind that he should retire. When age begins to erode a man’s faculties, he makes little mistakes and occasionally stumbles. Baugh appears to have misunderstood the minimum required sentence, and his remarks that the girl was older than her chronological age and just as responsible for the illegal intimacies as was the teacher, that the girl was a Jezebel, were both clueless and beyond the pale. Since then he’s backtracked, apologizing for his comments and ordering a new hearing to ensure that the teacher’s sentence is legal. He seems to be trying to set things right, which is to his credit.
But the issue isn’t whether he’s a bad man. It’s whether he’s a good judge, or still a good judge. He gets credit for trying to correct his mistakes, but those mistakes, mistakes that never should have been made, call into question his fitness for continued service on the bench. I think it’s time he retired, now or at the end of his term, which concludes in 2014. I suspect he will serve out his term, but elect not to seek re-election.