LITTLE ROCK — A Sherwood man was sentenced Thursday to 40 years in prison for repeatedly raping a 9-year-old girl over a four-year period.
Convicted as charged with three counts of rape, Johnathan “John” Johnston, 32, will have to serve 28 years before he is eligible for parole. He cried and trembled when the nine women and three men delivered their guilty verdicts after about 2 1/2 hours of deliberation. The girl wiped her eyes and whispered to her grandmother when the verdict was announced.
Producing a sentencing recommendation to Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright took jurors about an hour, with the foreman telling the judge that jurors had “struggled hard” with the punishment.
Johnston declined an offer by the judge to address the court before sentencing, but as bailiffs were leading him out in handcuffs he made what some members of the girl’s family said was an obscene gesture toward them and the girl, now 11, although it wasn’t clear whether the fifth-grader saw him. His hands were about waist level as he slightly turned toward them as he was leaving.
Johnston faced a minimum of 25 years in prison. His mother, Linda Kerr; father, Monty Johnston; and John Johnston’s fiancee, Jennifer MacMillan, an elementary school teacher, appealed to jurors for mercy, describing the divorced father of two as a devoted father and friend. Character witnesses on Johnston’s behalf included his stepfather, Dan Kerr, a retired Sherwood police lieutenant, and Johnston’s boss, John W. Martin, who owns a Sherwood plumbing company.
Defense attorney Bill James asked jurors to decide how long they wanted Johnston to be locked up and impose that sentence. He asked them to consider that Johnston has some good qualities as well.
“Figure out how much time you want Mr. Johnston to serve. You have the power to give him life. Do what you think is right,” he said. “You have to punish John, but I ask you to temper that with mercy. Not everyone is 100 percent bad. Not everyone is 100 percent good.”
Deputy prosecutor Scott Duncan asked jurors for a life sentence. He asked them to visualize Johnston becoming sexually aroused and then raping and sodomizing the girl - acts committed “over and over and over” from the time she was 5 years old until she was 9 and disclosed what had been going on. The girl had begged him to stop, but he ignored her, Duncan told the jury, with the final assault coming after she told him she was going to tell on him.
Every time she is intimate as an adult, Duncan said, the girl would have to remember what Johnston did to her. But she could get some comfort at that same time by also being able to recall how he was sent to prison forever,he said.
“He took from her something she would have been able to give to someone someday willingly, freely,” Duncan said. “I want you to think about the years and years of abuse this girl went through.”
In his testimony, Johnston admitted that his semen was found inside five pairs of the girl’s underwear - four of them taken from her home, the fifth pair she was wearing when her family called police in September 2011.
He denied any sexual contact with the girl, saying he had inadvertently tainted the undergarments when he used them to clean himself after sexual intercourse with his fiancee. The underwear had been part of dirty laundry on his bedroom floor, Johnston told jurors.
Johnston also acknowledged that a medical examination conducted immediately after her outcry showed genetic evidence and physical injury from rape.
He testified that he could not explain how police found 2,200 images on his home computer from the Daughter Destruction website, which is dedicated to older men having sex with young girls. Johnston said he barely used the computer and denied ever visiting the website.
He said he never saw the photographs before police showed them to him.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 01/26/2013