Subscribe
Community
Sex offense with child puts man in prison
Lab results lead to 20-year sentence
Friday, June 26, 2009
|
| ||
|
E-Mail This Article
A judge sentenced a Great Mills man this week to 20 years in prison, the maximum penalty on a conviction of attempting to commit a second-degree sexual offense three years ago with a disabled boy who was 7 years old.
Richard Allen Richardson, 23, also was ordered at Tuesday's proceedings before St. Mary's Circuit Judge C. Clarke Raley to serve a concurrent 10-year sentence on a related charge of committing a third-degree sexual offense with the same child, who suffered a stroke as an infant.
Jurors convicted Richardson of the two felony crimes at the close of a three-day trial last November, and the judge ordered that Richardson receive a psychiatric evaluation as part of a presentence investigation.
"We are concerned about public safety, because the evaluation came back indicating the young man is a pedophile," St. Mary's Assistant State's Attorney Robyn Riddle said Thursday in her office at the county courthouse in Leonardtown.
Richardson originally was arrested shortly after the September 2006 incident on charges obtained by Fred Dolinger of the St. Mary's Bureau of Criminal Investigations.
A district court judge found no probable cause to support the charges against Richardson at a preliminary hearing, the prosecutor said, but St. Mary's grand jurors indicted him last year after seized clothing was examined by a Maryland State Police laboratory in Pikesville and the Bode Laboratory in Lorton, Va.
The child's DNA was found inside the front of Richardson's underwear, the prosecutor said, and Richardson's DNA was found inside the back area of the child's diaper.
"We never would have had this case without that," Riddle said of the laboratory evidence.
A sentencing guidelines worksheet prepared by an agent with the state division of parole and probation recommended that Richardson receive an overall sentence of between four and nine years in prison.
The prosecutor said Tuesday's sentence included a recommendation that Richardson be considered for placement in the state prison system's Patuxent Institution, a correctional mental health center in Jessup.
"The child appears at this time to be doing well," Riddle said.
