Lafave judge says he made the only decision he could

Whether you have a problem with what Lafave did or not, I think it’s pretty clear that the judge screwed up royally here by not doing what prosecutors asked. Not surprisingly, he thinks he did the right thing:

But the judge said he has no regrets about rejecting Debra Lafave’s plea deal.

“Based on the evidence, I had no choice. I made the only decision I could,” he said.

Judge Stancil said he initially did not know which way he was going to rule. But as he began writing and laying out the facts, it became clear to him.

“In this case, I did not get enough information to do what the state requested me to do. I did not feel comfortable with doing it,” he continued.

It’s why, he said, he wrote a six-page decision asking for more evidence. Among his concerns:

# No one ever wants to testify, especially in sex-crime cases.
# Only one doctor talked about the traumatic effects of testifying, and after meeting with the victim for only 90 minutes. Stancil felt more psychological evidence should have been produced.
# Why didn’t the victim, his mother, or their lawyers speak out? They could have met privately with Stancil in chambers.
# The plea in Hillsborough County ran concurrently with Marion County’s deal.

But:

Action News found similar cases where pleas were comparable to Lafave’s deal, and the victim’s mother has criticized the judge for ignoring the family’s desires.

It’s tough for me to think that this judge wanted anything but the publicity a full blown trial would have brought.