Thursday, November 6, 2008

Tony Denton pleads guilty.

Click here to read article.

Click here to read more about Alford pleas.

Tony Denton, the minister who mysteriously disappeared from the website of Trinity Baptist Church (Jacksonville, FL) after Bob Gray's arrest, pleaded guilty to molesting young girls. He was attending Trinity Baptist Church at the time of his arrest.

The incidents took place at Berean Baptist Church, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, thirty years ago.

He pleaded guilty to 13 charges, but entered an Alford plea on three.

An Alford plea is when a defendant pleads 'not guilty' but acknowledges the evidence to convict him is there. The court can now render a guilty verdict and pronounce sentence.

Pronounce sentence they did: Denton was given three three year convictions---ALL SUSPENDED! He also gets unsupervised probation.

1 comment:

Megan said...

That sentece is a disgrace and a kick in the teeth to survivors everywhere. This is why victims don't talk about it. Corrupt officials and flawed systems across the nation let these people walk away from what they've done. Meanwhile, the victims have to walk life's road knowing they've gotten nothing but humiliation from the perp and the system. To save themselves the trouble of dealing with this kind of thing, victims just keep quiet. Can we blame them? So sad.