Child Rapist Set Free on Low Bail, Rapes Again

♦ 01/05/2010 ♦ Leave a comment

Written by Janet

In December of 2009,  26-year-old Joseph Gardner of Kingston was charged with raping a 3-year-old girl. At the time of the alleged attack, he was free on bail on an earlier charge of breaking into a Kingston house and raping a 5-year-old girl. The Plymouth district attorney requested $200,000 cash bail in the earlier case. But Judge Thomas Brownell saw fit to order just $10,000. And a Superior Court Judge upheld that choice. The judges put a cheap price tag on public safety. Gardner’s family put down the money, and he walked out the door.

What people need to understand is that bail  is intended primarily to guarantee a court appearance, not to serve as a pre-trial form of punishment. There’s no price list for judges to consult when setting bail. The goal is simply to maximize the likelihood that the defendant, who is presumed innocent, will appear in court.  But to let a man who knowingly raped an innocent child, to go free?

There is a check list with 17 boxes for judges to consult when determining bail. The top two are “the nature and circumstances of the offense charged’’ and “the potential penalty the defendant faces.’’ The others mostly concern the background of the defendant, such as family ties, prior use of aliases, prior failure to appear in court, and record of convictions. A defendant who comes up clean on the background factors is usually deemed a minimum flight risk. But certainly there are times when judges look more closely at the nature of the crime than the defendant’s background.

The punishment for child rape is a life in prison sentence.  Isn’t this more incentive for a higher bail, so he doesn’t flee?  Child rape should carry a presumption of a higher bail, and judges shouldn’t hesitate to set an amount that keeps a defendant waiting for trial behind bars, if the circumstances warrant. For now, at least, Gardner’s bail has been revoked. And it’s reasonable for people to expect that he will not see the light of freedom unless and until he is acquitted of both crimes.

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