Three young men. Three unrelated cases of statutory rape and very similar circumstances. Three negotiated pleas. Three entirely different sentences: probation for one. Four years in prison for another. Seven years in prison for the third.
Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols disposed of all three cases with sentences this morning during docket sounding, the last step before trial when most cases are resolved through plea bargains.
Sentencing disparities are not infrequent. They may have perfectly valid rationales. But they are rarely are explained in court or through through court papers. They certainly were not today. They can leave families of the accused bewildered if not angry, especially when the cases share essential similarities, and even more so when race may seem to be a factor, even if it isn’t so in fact.
Negotiated pleas are reached between the two sides’ lawyers. In sex-offense cases with minor victims, they typically involve the family of the victim as well. The family generally is in agreement with the terms of the negotiated plea, and can sometimes influence the outcome–for better or for worse, as far as the defendant is concerned, even though it may be at the expense of the facts of the case or of what is supposed to be the neutrality of the law: a more magnanimous family may be a defendant’s salvation. A harsher or at times absent family may leave the state throwing the book at the defendant. Those factors unquestionably apply. But it’s difficult to pin them down to particular cases.
Judges are not barred from rejecting negotiated pleas. But they don’t like to do it. The plea forms–all the same but for the few blanks filled in with the defendant’s fate–say nothing more than the strict essence of the proposed sentence and its conditions. So today’s pleas opened no window into the background of what went into them. They only showed how the very same charges involving similar circumstances can lead to very different sentences.
None of the three sex cases involved force. All involved the same level of subterfuge and self-deception about the victim’s age by the defendants. All were between individuals who knew each other. All involved consensual sex, to the extent that a minor may consent to sex. Under Florida law, there is no such thing as a minor consenting to sex. But there is a key difference between what amounts to consensual sex, as in the three cases today, and forcible rape: one is a second-degree felony, the other is either a first-degree felony or a life felony.
The three cases today were among more than two dozen dispositions of other cases of all sorts (including two cases involving lesser sex offenses that resulted in probation). The disparities become apparent only in retrospect, though rarely as dramatically as they were today.
Josiah Morales is a 19-year-old Palm Coast resident. Last year he had sex twice with a 13-year-old girl who’d snuck out of her house. He’d met the girl at a 15-year-old friend’s place. The girl and the 15-year-old had been engaging in sex. Somehow, Morales convinced her to have sex with him. She did, twice. The girl felt that she had been coerced or at least pressured into sex the second time, because she had no way to get home and Morales had made getting her an Uber conditional on her having sex with him again.
He was charged with statutory rape, a second-degree felony with maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge: child abuse, a third-degree felony.
He was adjudicated guilty and sentenced to five years probation, with no early termination on the probation. His probation will be the equivalent of life as a sex offender. He has to complete sex-offender treatment and submit to annual polygraphs as part of that treatment, and may be fitted with a GPS monitor. He is barred from working with children, spending time with children, volunteering anywhere children are present, or spending time in parks and other places where children gather. He is also barred from the internet without approval from his probation officer. He must also submit to a night curfew for the first two years.
But once the probation is over, he will remain a felon, but will not be a designated sex offender. Morales is Latino.
Brandon Raymond is a 21-year-old Palm Coast resident. Last summer he had a three-month relationship with a 15-year-old girl. He allegedly found out her age later, though not knowing a person’s age is not a defense in such cases. They had sex at least twice. He was charged with two counts of statutory rape after the girl’s parent found out that her daughter and Raymond were a couple.
Today Raymond was sentenced to four years in prison followed by 11 years on sex-offender probation. His sentence may have been far lower had he not also been sentenced on grave charges in Volusia County—aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and two counts of throwing a deadly missile into an occupied vehicle. Added together, the Flagler and Volusia charges exposed him to life in prison, the judge told him today, with a minimum mandatory sentence of 15 years.
The negotiated plea set all that aside for the four years, a remarkable “downward departure,” as the legal term goes, from the sentencing guidelines despite the combined severity of the charges. (A Flagler County Sheriff’s release this afternoon incorrectly attributed the four-year sentence only to the two statutory rape counts.)
At one point Raymond had suggested that he might want an open plea: instead of going with the negotiated agreement, he wanted the judge to impose the sentence. Nichols advised him strongly against it, in essence telling him without explicitly saying so that with an open plea, she could sentence him to life in prison, or to 15 years, or to anywhere between that minimum and life. He relented. Raymond is white.
Jordan Pittmon is a 26-year-old Palm Coast resident. In May 2024 he had sex with a 13-year-old girl who had snuck out of her house. They had sex three times one night and the next morning. He was charged with one count of statutory rape. The Statewide prosecutor–as opposed to the local State Attorney’s Office–added a charge of traveling to meet a minor because Pittmon and the girl had chatted by Snapchat and at one point she had summoned him to pick her up from a Circle K.
Morales had also traveled to meet the 13-year-old, with whom he’d subsequently chatted on Snapchat, and had either himself or through his 15-year-old friend arranged for her to be picked up by an Uber. He did not face a charge of traveling to meet a minor. Raymond had also traveled to meet his girlfriend. One of their sexual encounters was in his car near the Palm Coast Walmart. He did not face a traveling to meet a minor charge.
Pittmon has never been arrested before. His total exposure on the two charges was 30 years, and the prosecutor said that if he’d gone to trial and was found guilty, the minimum sentence would have been nine and a half years.
His family members told the judge he’d been an honor student and held a job since he was 15 (he lost his job over the arrest) and had made an isolated mistake. “I totally understand punishment,” Pittmon’s father pleaded with the judge. “What we’re here for is to digress the punishment,” he said, noting his son’s clean record until now.
“This often is the case where people do things that they’re not supposed to do, and it doesn’t mean they’re a 100 percent a terrible person,” the judge told the family members. “There are some excellent aspects to your son’s personality, to his makeup, that he’s so well loved by people that are here today. But this is a serious crime.”
In his negotiated plea, Pittmon was sentenced to seven years in prison followed by five years on sex offender probation and a lifetime designation as a sex offender. Pittmon is Black.
Atwp says
These stories are sickening. Am sure they are true but sickening. 26 year old having sex with a 13 year old. The other guys, these are terrible men. The sad thing is these kind of things happens all the time very few get caught. Black men keep it zipped. Date adult women, leave girls alone. That goes for all men.