Teacher Gets 30 Days In Jail For Raping 14-Year-Old Student Who Commited Suicide

A mother in Montana is outraged that a high school teacher who admitted raping her 14-year-old daughter received only a month in prison, while her daughter took her own life.

"I think this sentence is a joke, a travesty," the mother, Auliea Hanlon, told CNN on Tuesday night, a day after the sentencing.

"People will lose faith in our justice system. I have."

Hanlon said she was particularly upset that the sentencing judge, G. Todd Baugh, said her daughter "seemed older than her chronological age" and was "as much in control of the situation" as the teacher.

Auliea Hanlon, the girl’s mother, shouted “You people suck!” as she stormed out of the courtroom, the paper reported.

Baugh later acknowledged to CNN that "that was not the best choice of words."

The case began in 2008 when the teen was a student at Billings Senior High School and Stacey Dean Rambold was a teacher. She was 14 at the time; he was 49. Hanlon claims Rambold's "pre-sexual grooming" of her daughter led to the pair having sex. School officials learned of the relationship, and Rambold resigned. Later that year, authorities charged Rambold with three counts of sexual intercourse without consent.

"It's not probably the kind of rape most people think about," Baugh said. "It was not a violent, forcible, beat-the-victim rape, like you see in the movies. But it was nonetheless a rape. It was a troubled young girl, and he was a teacher. And this should not have occurred."

As the case wound its way through the legal system, the girl committed suicide. She was a few weeks shy of her 17th birthday.

"As a result of the sexual assault and its aftermath, (the teen) experienced severe emotional distress, humiliation and embarrassment and fell into irreversible depression that tragically led to her taking her own life on February 6, 2010," Hanlon said in a complaint filed against Rambold.

Hanlon told CNN the relationship was to blame for her daughter's death.

"Well it definitely had something to do with it," she said. "A teenager's whole life is about school and their friends, and he turned everyone against her."

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