What does it take to get a pedophile teacher behind bars?
Outrage as molester keeps his council seat!
Councilman to plead guilty to assaulting girl while teaching
Councilman to plead guilty to enticing child
Councilman Pleads Guilty In Alleged ‘Sex With Students’ Case
In Jacinto City it’s apparently impossible to get said pedophile into prison, at least when he’s a city councilman.
Claudio “Clyde” Ochoa is a child abusing pervert who took two girls off campus from Galena Park High School for sex while working as a substitute teacher. He is also a city councilman in Jacinto City. Unfortunately, that will not change following his plea bargain on charges related to his sexual assault of these two girls.
In exchange for a guilty plea on a misdemeanor charge of “enticing a child,” Ochoa will do 45 days in the county lockup instead of doing 20 years in a state prison and paying a $10,000 fine. Ochoa will also be allowed to keep his council seat, since state law does not consider misdemeanor to be of sufficient gravity to require resignation.
Ochoa’s lawyer maintains his client did not have sexual contact with this girl. There is no mention of any case pending for the second girl.
Ochoa had led both girls away from school during lunch and then allegedly sexually assaulted them. He will now be pleading down to enticing a girl away from school (a misdemeanor) and the felony assault charge will be dropped.
Excuse me? Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.
Now let’s look at this. I’m a teacher in the same district (though not the same school). If I had contact even remotely resembling this with a student, I would certainly be doing hard time. No way would I be allowed to plead out to a piddly misdemeanor. Something stinks in this case. Who made the decision to let this molester slide? Why did the judge accept such an inappropriate deal? We need to know, and we need to find a way to stop such miscarriages of justice from being permitted in the future.
(Tip credit to Texas Teacher)
On the face of this, of course it looks bad.
However, this is exactly the kind of deal that happens when there is something wrong with the prosecution of the case.
A witness flips (changes their testimony, and/or denies anything happened), an alibi witness pops up, whathaveyou.
We don’t know why the deal is going down the way it is, of course, because we assume the guy is guilty on all counts and the grease is in, or something.
My guess, and it’s only that, is above: Something turned sour in the investigation and they got him with something because if he had insisted on a trial, he might have skated.
Just a guess.
In this case, it looks like we have a young, 25 year old subsitute teacher who took two high school girls to lunch and ended up kissing the younger one. (What a creep.) That should be the end of his educational career, as well as his seat on the city council. He claims (And the 15 year old agrees?) that the kissing was “consensual”, although the last time I heard, a minor isn’t considered old enough to consent to anything of a sexual nature with an adult man.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2671776
I’m surprised they can’t get him dumped over the moral turpitude clause; a misdemeanor isn’t enough to cause him to step down, but moral turpitude is. Or at least, it would have been if the judge had thought that a grown man enticing a teenager was an example of it. Apparently, he didn’t.
Actually its not all his fault those two girls knew what they were getting into. I used to go to school there and one of the girls was bragging about him and her and it got to one of the teachers and everyone started to know about it. No one said anything about it until supposed on night at the baseball field both of them got caught by an officer. So I really dont blame the judge for letting him slide just a little bit.