McMINNVILLE, Tenn. Near the end of the 59-minute probation violation hearing, convicted sexual offender Pamela Rogers rose to address the judge who would send her to jail for more than seven years.
“I’m sorry,” she began.
The tears fell first as a trickle that she wiped away with a wad of tissue in a handcuffed hand, but the salty flow quickly became a river of sobs as she further apologized for the pain and the embarrassment her actions of the past two years had brought her victim and his family, her family and her friends.
Then the former elementary school gym teacher asked Circuit Court Judge Bart Stanley for mercy.
But the judge was not in a generous mood.
Less than four minutes after her tearful apology, Stanley sternly took the young woman to task for her behavior since she was paroled in February.
“The thing I can’t understand is why, when you were released after seven or eight months in jail, you didn’t blink an eye. You continued at that point to violate your probation and contacted this family, send lewd videos and lewd pictures to the same person,” the judge told the hushed courtroom.
Sitting two rows behind Rogers in the spectators’ gallery, her parents, Lamar and Karen Rogers, lowered their chins and wiped away tears.
In order to deliver a message to the state of Tennessee, the judge said in a measured voice, he was sending Rogers to the Tennessee Prison for Women to serve the remainder of the eight-year sentence that she received in August after pleading no-contest to four counts of sexual battery.
The charges involved a sexual relationship with a teenage boy, then 14, who was a student at the school where Rogers taught, Centertown Elementary. Court documents indicate she had sex with him multiple times, at school, in her car and at his home. After her conviction, she served a few months in jail, then was released on probation and ordered not to communicate with the boy.
However, authorities said that, less than two months later, she sent explicit photos and videos of herself to the boy via cameraphone. They also said she had created a Web page through MySpace.com on which she posted messages to the boy, addressing him by his basketball jersey number, saying she was still in love with him and suggesting she would wait until he turned 18 to continue their romance.
“I don’t mind giving someone a second chance if there’s a reasonable likelihood that they can be rehabilitated, that they will take probation seriously in an attempt to straighten their life out,” the judge said in court Friday. “We all make mistakes, but you have done everything except show this court that you wanted to abide by the terms of your probation and get your life back in order and follow the law.”
The decision pleased District Attorney General Dale Potter, who told reporters: “She deserves what she got.”
Actually, she deserved more, but why should we let justice get in the way of a double standard?
