Despite an attorney's plea to consider a woman's lifelong history of being abused and give her the minimum sentence for forcing two teenage girls to prostitute themselves, a federal judge went the opposite direction Wednesday.
"What was needed here was for an adult to step in and say, 'That's wrong,'" U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. said in explaining his admittedly difficult decision to impose a 12-year sentence -- three to five years above the recommended penalty range -- for a 30-year-old Wynne woman who pleaded guilty last year to sex trafficking minors.
Amber Nicole Johnson acknowledged during her Nov. 3 guilty plea that the girls were her 15- and 17-year-old cousins who had run away from a foster home a year earlier to live with her, her boyfriend and her two young children in Jonesboro, only to be pushed to engage in sex for money to help her support her two children.
Johnson admitted she started taking the girls to hotel rooms where she would leave them to baby-sit her children while she went out to solicit money through prostitution. But then, Johnson said, she started allowing the "johns" to decide whether they wanted to have sex with her or one of her younger cousins.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Allison Bragg said that when a man chose one of the girls, Johnson accompanied them. Bragg said the men usually paid $20 for sex but sometimes paid $50 or even $100. Sometimes Johnson kept the money, and other times, Bragg said, Johnson gave it to whichever girl earned it.
Johnson, a plump woman with soft brown curls cascading down her back, sat in court Wednesday next to her attorney, Molly Sullivan of the federal public defender's office, often wiping her eyes with a tissue.
Knowing that Johnson faced a statutory minimum sentence of 10 years but that federal guidelines suggested a lesser penalty of 87 to 108 months, or roughly seven to nine years, Sullivan asked the judge to impose the 10-year minimum.
Sullivan said that while she rarely advocates for a low sentence because of a defendant's difficult background, she believed that Johnson's situation warranted that consideration.
"She grew up molested and sexually abused by several family members and watched the abuse of other family members," Sullivan said. "She bounced around between foster homes and began prostituting herself as a matter of survival."
Noting that sex trafficking has now become a major law enforcement concern across the country, with celebrities campaigning to stop it, Sullivan said that wasn't the case when Johnson was growing up. If it had been, she said, perhaps Johnson would have been more aware of what was happening and could have avoided being caught up in it.
Sullivan said it was worth noting that when Johnson's cousins came to live with her, "they were already involved in it. They were all surviving together. ... This is how she grew up."
While the idea of sex trafficking "sounds absolutely horrible," Sullivan said, that's often because the details of each situation aren't known and can vary widely.
For Johnson and others who grew up as she did, Sullivan said, "it's an alternate reality. ... This is their lifestyle."
As a result of an FBI investigation that began in late April 2015, when Johnson was arrested by state police on a Craighead County warrant at a central Arkansas hotel with the 15-year-old and Johnson's two children, ages 2 and 3, "the worst thing that has happened to her is she's lost her children, and she's probably never going to see them again," Sullivan said.
Johnson's mother has sent her letters since she has been jailed, but has never visited her, Sullivan said, stressing, "She has nobody. She's just floundering."
"I don't think her growing up justifies her crime, but it explains it," Sullivan said. "She has had a rough go of it, and I hardly ever say that as an explanation for someone's behavior."
Bragg countered that Johnson didn't have to perpetuate the abusive lifestyle in which she was raised.
"Because of what Ms. Johnson's done, there might be two other minors who will grow up to do what she's done," the prosecutor argued. "Ms. Johnson was that someone for these two young girls. She could have prevented that."
Bragg added, "This was not a survival method. A survival method is getting a job, not literally pimping out your younger female cousins." As for the argument that the girls were "already involved" in prostitution when they went to live with Johnson, Bragg said, "I would remind this court that a minor can't consent."
Marshall, who had notified the parties ahead of time that he was considering imposing an "upward variance" of the guideline-recommended penalty range, called a brief recess to think over his decision after hearing the arguments.
When he returned to the bench, he asked Johnson if she had anything to say.
Through tears, she replied, "The way I looked at it and the way other people looked at it were so different. I didn't look at it like it was hurting anybody or it was illegal. It was just something we was used to doing and something we'd done for a long time."
Marshall said he understood that "part of human nature is to get used to a situation, so it seems normal when, from a step back, it seems abnormal and is illegal."
But he said that after wrestling with the type of sentence he should impose, "my decision is to vary upward by a small amount."
"I think we would all agree that teenagers are especially vulnerable to the adults that are around them," the judge said. "What was needed here was for an adult to step in and say, 'That's wrong,' or to do whatever it takes. ... It's just unacceptable in a civilized society for a teenager to be prostituted like that. A family member has an obligation to step in and be the person who changes things."
Looking directly at Johnson, Marshall said, "I have done my best to consider you as a person and the circumstances you grew up in. As Ms. Sullivan said, they are a part of the explanation, but they're not an excuse for the choices you made. It's important for the law to speak clearly and plainly about the consequences of this conduct to deter other people, to encourage the better angels of their nature to step back and consider the wrongfulness of their actions."
Marshall also imposed a five-year term of supervised release. After Sullivan said Johnson has cervical cancer, he agreed to recommend that she be housed in a women's prison near Fort Worth with a medical facility on the premises.
The judge also gave Johnson credit for the time she has already served in federal custody and said the sentence would be served concurrently with any sentence Johnson receives in the case in Craighead County Circuit Court, where she is to appear Friday.
Before adjourning, Marshall told Johnson that while "it's not my job to preach sermons," he would encourage her to think about how her life would have been different if someone had intervened on her behalf, and to consider someday being the intervening person for someone else.
"One person can make a real difference in someone else's life if they will step in at the right moment," he said.
Metro on 05/26/2016