Pieper Lewis, 17, was sentenced on Tuesday to five years probation and payment of damages for killing a man he accuses of raping her. .
Lewis pleaded guilty to the June 2020 murder of Zachary Brooks, 37. The teenager stabbed him 30 times while he slept after being sexually assaulted more than once.
Judge David M. Porter, of Iowa, ordered that the American, in addition to serving five years of probation, be placed in a residential institution for young people and women and use a tracking device. The payment of $150,000 in restitution to the Brooks family is mandatory in the state for murder crimes.
If she violates parole rules, however, she could be sent to prison and serve up to 20 years for wrongful death and bodily harm.
The defense of Lewis, a black woman, and the American describe that she was being subjected to sex trafficking by Christopher Brown, a man who took her in after she left the country’s residence and claimed to be her boyfriend, but demanded that she have sex. with other men in exchange for money, consume alcohol and drugs.
She was reportedly forced to go to the home of Brooks, an acquaintance of Brown’s, and was sexually abused more than once when she was unconscious. When she woke up and found out about the abuse, she would have stabbed him.
In testimony on Tuesday, Lewis, according to reports in the US newspaper The New York Times, said he wished the sequence of events that day had never occurred. She, however, criticized the court decision. “That means I face rape, abuse, hate, manipulation, abandonment, loss of my parents and loneliness.”
The American’s defense tries to accuse Brown of favoring the practice of sex trafficking, but he has not yet been indicted. Prosecutors in the case claimed during the lawsuit that Brooks was asleep when he was stabbed and therefore did not pose an immediate danger.
Data compiled by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, linked to the black parliamentary bench, in a report published in 2020, shows that black girls and women are more subjected to sex trafficking. About 40% of crime victims are black women.
Among the main reasons would be the fact that black women are the majority among the poorer strata of the population, and the socioeconomic precariousness, aggravated by factors such as unemployment and financial debts, would favor the activities of traffickers among this group.
The case has sparked criticism on social media, with users saying that convicting a teenager for killing her rapist would be a mistake. Leland Schipper, an American who claims to have been Lewis’ teacher, started a virtual fundraising campaign that collected, as of Wednesday morning (14), $137,000 for her.
He says the amount would go towards paying compensation and, if exceeded, helping Lewis with higher education costs — during the two years she was held in a juvenile detention center, from murder to trial, she received the high school diploma.
“Pieper doesn’t owe that man’s family justice. She doesn’t deserve to be burdened for the rest of her life because Iowa wrote a law that doesn’t give judges any power over how it’s enforced. This law doesn’t make sense in many cases, but in this case. , is morally unjustifiable,” the professor wrote.
Cases similar to this have already mobilized the United States. In 2019, the governor of Tennessee granted a pardon to Cyntoia Brown, a woman who served 15 years in prison for killing a man when she was a teenage victim of trafficking.
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