19 year old Cody Herrera was just convicted of raping a 14 year old girl.
The judge presiding over the case, Randy Stoker, has ordered Herrera to complete a year long therapeutic program, as well as to not have sex until marriage.
He will serve no jail time for his crime.
Herrera was originally sentenced to five to 15 years in prison, but Judge Stoker suspended the sentence in favor of a rehabilitation program that serves as a middle ground between probation and prison time. If Herrera completes the program, he will be given probation. If not, he could be sent to prison to serve the original sentence.
Stoker's unusual celibacy order relies on an old Idaho law about "fornication" that forbids "any unmarried person" from having "sexual intercourse with an unmarried person of the opposite sex."
Additionally, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare has not designated Herrera as a sexual predator -- despite the fact that he pled guilty to sneaking into the room of a 14-year-old girl he knew in 2015, removing her clothes as she asked him to stop, and raping her while she cried.
"It was his intent from the beginning to take what he wanted from my 14-year-old child — her virginity," the victim’s mother said in a court statement. "And he stayed around until he got it from her. Cody will never understand what he has done to our family."
"This judge's celibacy order is almost as nonsensical as failing to sentence a man who raped a girl to any prison time, or to register him as a sex offender. It's not sex outside of marriage that's the problem here — it's sex that was forced on a minor, a.k.a. child rape, which you'd think judges would seek to prevent by putting perpetrators behind bars. Not in this case," said Shaakirrah R. Sanders, an associate professor at the University of Idaho College of Law.
What do you think about Judge Stoker's decision?