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Philadelphia Inquirer
Tuesday, February 5, 2002
Man guilty of raping girl sentenced to 15-30 years
Jasper Washington of North Phila. assaulted a 7-year-old in 1996. Police had originally mishandled the case. Girl's rapist is sentenced to 15-30 years.
By Clea Benson,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Calling the case "one of the most upsetting" she had ever seen, a Common Pleas Court judge yesterday sentenced the rapist of a 7-year-old girl to the maximum possible sentence of 15 to 30 years in prison, six years after police initially failed to investigate the crime. Judge Amanda Cooperman also declared North Philadelphia auto mechanic Jasper Washington, 34, a sexually violent predator, which means he will have to report to authorities regularly and must register with the communities where he lives after he is released.
Washington was convicted in December 2000 of snatching his victim, the niece of his then-girlfriend, off the street in January 1996 and then driving her to Fairmount Park, where he sodomized her. He pushed the girl, who was not wearing a coat, out of his car into three feet of snow and told her he would shoot her if she told anyone. The girl was found by neighborhood residents, who alerted a police officer. But police originally botched the handling of the case. The responding patrol officer, who was later suspended for six days, listed the incident as a "missing child" and dropped the girl off at her home before her mother returned from work. After the girl's mother discovered what had happened and complained, a sex-crimes investigator was assigned to the case. Though the girl and her family identified Washington as the attacker, the investigator never talked to him, and the case was closed in February 1996. The case was reopened in December 1999, one day after The Inquirer published an article describing how police had mishandled the case. A DNA test later conclusively linked Washington to the crime.
Washington's case was one of the latest successful prosecutions stemming from a police decision to reopen 2,000 sexual-assault cases wrongly ignored by investigators. The renewed investigations followed an Inquirer series documenting that the police rape squad routinely shelved rape and sexual-assault cases for at least two decades. Despite the evidence and his conviction, Washington yesterday maintained his innocence. "As far as the young lady, my sympathy goes out to her," he said, looking toward the victim, now 13, who sat in court with her mother. "As far as what happened, I never knew this young lady to commit a crime like this."
Washington, who has fathered seven children with five women, burst into tears as he speculated that his own children would grow up without him. The victim's mother, Mary Williams, read a statement her daughter had written: "Some days I feel mad that it's my fault I got raped. . . . He makes me feel so embarrassed that I can't even talk to my own mother about what happened to me." Then Williams looked at Washington and said: "I do forgive you. . . . I will never forget what you have done to my family." In asking for the maximum sentence, Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Jobes pointed toward Washington's pattern of denial - not only in his commission of the crime, but in his past problems as well. Two psychologists - one on behalf of the prosecution and another on behalf of the defense - testified that he denied his history of truancy-related academic problems and his history of drug and alcohol abuse, including, at one point, a habit of drinking a case of beer and a fifth of whiskey a day. Though Washington was arrested seven times and convicted four times, none of those offenses was a sexual assault. Court records show that in 1996, a 13-year-old girl told police Washington exposed himself to her and offered her $5 to expose herself to him. That report was not pursued. Defense attorney Tim Golden asked for leniency, arguing that the ordeal had caused Washington to "reflect very seriously on the choices that he makes." Cooperman denied that request. "The defendant's leniency is that this child did not die in that snow," she said. Clea Benson's e-mail address is cbenson@phillynews.com.
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