Officer convicted of rape gets home detention after judge finds no evidence of 'psychological injury

[Jilly_in_VA]

A Baltimore County police officer convicted of rape was allowed to remain on home detention, prosecutors announced Monday, after a judge determined at the man’s sentencing that there was “not evidence of any psychological injury to the victim,” even though the woman claimed she received therapy.

Anthony Westerman was convicted in August on multiple counts of rape, sexual offense and assault of a 22-year-old woman in 2017. Westerman, 27, who was separately convicted of assaulting another woman in 2019, was sentenced Friday to 15 years in prison for second-degree rape.

But Circuit Judge Keith Truffer suspended all of the sentence but four years of home detention for the 2017 conviction while Westerman pursues an appeal. Truffer also sentenced Westerman to just one day in jail for the 2019 assault, which he described as a “boorish” act, according to prosecutors.

Scott D. Shellenberger, the state’s attorney for Baltimore County, said in a news release that Truffer “determined that there was not evidence of any psychological injury to the victim despite the fact that she indicated she has received therapy for the attack on her and that the Judge had stated at the time of the verdict that what had happened to the victim ‘may be the most traumatic moment of’ her life.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/11/23/baltimore-officer-rape-house-detention-westerman/
___________________________________________________________________________
If I said what I wanted done to this judge it would get me suspended from DU.....

[mercuryblues]

1. I hold him down for ya

[I_UndergroundPanther]

2. I'm putting my Doc Martins on..

[Solly Mack]

3. Makes me wonder how many women the Judge has attacked.

[RKP5637]

4. K&R!!!!! n/t

[ZZenith]

5. Appointed by a Republican governor.

Keith Truffer is a judge on the Third Circuit Court for Baltimore County in Maryland. He was appointed by Governor Larry Hogan (R) on January 13, 2016.[1] Truffer won election to his seat in the general election on November 8, 2016.


https://ballotpedia.org/Keith_Truffer

[berniesandersmittens]

6. .

[Guilded Lilly]

8. Yup. With the torrents of thoughts rampaging through my head, your response...

Is mine as well.

.

With a bit of

[NCjack]

7. What is necessary to restore rape to being a serious crime? I can see why people

seek out-of-court solutions.

[Sanity Claws]

9. What difference does that make?

Even if it were true that he had raped an amazingly resilient victim, the point is that he RAPED! He should be punished appropriate to the crime, not how resilient the victim was.

[MuseRider]

10. On my way Jilly.

We will all go down together. Sadly that just may be our only solution, this is more frequent these days and it is not going to get better for us. We are headed into a really really dark future. The news out of Ohio after Texas is really very scary. We have been here before and I had thought we would never have to do it again.

[slightlv]

11. You realize this is the 2nd instance in 2 weeks of this, right?

My failing memory can't remember the exact particulars of last week... but a judge dismissed the "young man" who had raped girls at a party (at least one under age) as jail would not be an "appropriate" place for him. It was not the first time he had done this, either. But something hinky was going on... like the parents threw the party and made sure there was plenty of alcohol. The judge did say something to the effect that the boy was from a good family with solid roots, in a good college, moneyed, etc. (like that makes up for it all). When he announced all this, the youngest victim ran from the courtroom and was found in the ladies restroom, vomiting.

The above story got one small article and then disappeared due to all the press on the Rittenhouse case. While I agree that case was important, it masked a pattern I see happening to women again. Violence done to us... even the ultimate violence... is being minimized and thrown out in the worst possible way - by letting our abusers and rapists not only walk free, but walk free excused and justified.

I've got my eyes open to these patterns. I finally gave in and took a cheap option to the Wash Post for a year. A jump off DU to a story there, and then a scan of the WP stories is what led me to the rape case above. I plan to continue doing this and tracking it on a spreadsheet, if for no other reason than to prove to myself I'm not going crazy. My hubby went bonkers when I read him the story you just posted, Jilly. I'd read him the story from last week when I found it. He's seeing the pattern, too... and he's worried for me and my daughter, and has talked to our grandsons. Already, he does most errands, especially after dark. Maybe it's just my age, but I'm finding today to be more dangerous than I did the first time we went through all this, decades ago.