A 39-year-old woman, who is currently serving out a one year jail sentence for sexually assaulting her 11-year-old son, has petitioned the court for early release for good behavior. But her son, the victim, has also petitioned the court, begging the Judge to keep his mother behind bars for as long as possible.

In a letter written by the boy to the court, he states that his mother’s request for early release is “absurd”, given what she did to him. He says that the abuse was not just sexual, but also physical and mental, and that no child should have to suffer what he went through at the hand of his mother.

“My mother is no good, scary and she is bad for what she put (the family) through,” the letter says. Read for the court by Assistant Prosecutor Daniel Rose, the letter goes on to share some of the abuses that the boy claims to have suffered as a result of his mother. “She used to get drunk and sometimes she would punch, slap, pull my hair and kick me. … She is that cruel to me.”

The boy’s mother was convicted of Second degree criminal sexual conduct (CSC) for sexually assaulting her son while she was “black-out drunk” one day, and mistook her son for her boyfriend. She was sentenced in January of this year, to spend one year in the Livingston County Jail, followed by five years of probation.

The assault was an accident, but the boy is still scared of his mother.

The reason for the woman’s request for early release was that there were no more classes available to her through the jail. But her son believes that no reason is good enough to justify early release. Infact, he asked the Judge to increase her sentence and give her “more time”, saying that her 1 year sentence was “unacceptable.”

Judge Michael P. Hatty however, denied both requests. He did not allow the woman early release as she had requested, and did not lengthen her sentence as her son had asked him to do. Instead, he said that her original sentence, handed down in January, still stands.

While many people may think that because this mother made a terrible mistake and was sentenced to jail as a result, that this would mean the automatic termination of her parental rights. However, while CPS may remove her children from her home and place them in foster care, Michigan law states that incarceration is not sufficient grounds for terminating a parent’s rights.
In 2010, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that incarceration in prison alone is not sufficient reason for the court to permanently terminate a parent’s right to their child. This ruling came as a result of a decision that was made by a Macomb County Judge, who terminated a father’s rights to his two sons on the grounds that he had been sentenced to prison. The Court of Appeals upheld this decision, but it was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court.