Via Screechy at the Miscellany Room: frat boy gets stern “tsk tsk” for four counts of sexual assault.

Even though Jacob Walter Anderson was indicted on four counts of sexual assault, the ex-fraternity president won’t spend a single day in prison.

Instead, a plea agreement allowed the former Baylor University student to plead no contest to a lesser charge of unlawful restraint.

That means if the 24-year-old successfully completes three years of deferred probation and pays a $400 fine, his criminal record will be wiped clean of the charge, CNN affiliate KWKT said.

Wow, a whole four hundred dollar fine. That should keep the prosecutors in paper towels for a good three months.

The plea agreement between Anderson’s defense team and the district attorney’s office in McLennan County infuriated the victim.

“I have been through hell and back and my life has been forever turned upside down,” the victim wrote in a letter to her attorney.

“This guy violently raped me multiple times, choked me, and when I blacked out, he dumped me face down on the ground and left me to die. When I woke up aspirating up my own vomit, my friends immediately took me to the hospital.”

Read the whole thing; it’s hair-raisingly awful.

The prosecutor says she took the plea because she lost a previous rape case.

I’m going to let Screechy take over here:

“Please remove any sharp objects from your vicinity before reading this enraging story of a white male fraternity boy getting a sweetheart plea bargain in a rape case. He will spend no time in prison, not have to register as a sex offender, and his criminal record will be wiped clean if he can manage not to get through three entire years of probation.

Why such a great deal? Because the prosecutor recently lost a rape case, and god forbid a prosecutor should have to go through that trauma again. Why, it might mess up that ADA’s “conviction rate”* that she’ll brag about when she runs for elected office some day.

Oh sorry, of course it isn’t that, it’s that an acquittal would mean that the defendant gets to avoid punishment, whereas under the plea deal he… uh…. shit.

Ok, I don’t actually know if this particular ADA has political ambitions. And many prosecutors’ offices are overworked (and underpaid) and pressured to clear cases, and trials do take up a lot of resources. But at some point you have to be willing to walk away from a lousy deal, and risk losing a trial, or else what good are you doing? Frankly — and I don’t like this kind of reasoning, because it treats the flaws of the system as if they are virtues, but in this case it might be true — an acquittal at least would have been expensive for this defendant and his family.

*Here’s a little tip from your pal Screechy. Lawyers who brag about their “win rates” are almost always full of shit. Most criminal cases plead out, and most civil cases settle, so what counts as a “win”? Well, a lot of prosecutors count pleas like this as “wins” because, hey, they secured a conviction.”