A powerful metro Atlanta judge announced this week he will retire after a state agency investigated how he cut a deal for a convicted sex offender.
Without informing prosecutors or the victim, Chief Superior Court Judge William F. Lee Jr. threw out a statutory rape conviction against a man who had sex with a 14-year-old Coweta County girl and let him plead guilty to an offense that took him off the sex offender registry, court records show.
Only when the district attorney's office found out did Lee reinstate the initial sentence. Lee's handling of the case was investigated by the state's Judicial Qualifications Commission, which halted its probe Thursday when Lee agreed to retire from the bench on May 1, according to court records.
Lee, 69, was unavailable for comment Friday, his secretary said. On Thursday, Lee, who has been a judge for more than 31 years, said he was resigning because, "I'm tired and I'm ready."
When he steps down, Lee will become the seventh chief Superior Court judge in Georgia investigated for ethical lapses to leave the bench since 2010.
A lawyer who represented the victim's family during the case expressed outrage the family was not notified of Lee's decision to vacate the initial conviction.
"We received no notice whatsoever," attorney Michael Prieto said. "You’d think a judge would give the victim of a sexual assault the opportunity to be heard on the issue. It disgusts me he didn’t. "
Prieto said the legal system has done well in recent decades to listen to victims in sexual assault cases, “but things like this set back the law 75 years. ... This case was Darwinian at its worst, an adult athlete taking advantage of a prepubescent girl.”
Chief Assistant District Attorney Monique Kirby said her office would have no comment until District Attorney Pete Skandalakis, who is out of the country, returns next week.
Judicial Qualifications Commission director Jeff Davis said the matter between the agency and Lee had been resolved and declined further comment. The commission did not file formal charges against Lee, but said in court filings Lee had been accused of entering orders in cases without notifying all parties and attorneys involved.
Former DeKalb County District Attorney J. Tom Morgan said the judge was “violating all sorts of rules" by changing the sentence without a representative from the district attorney's office present. He said the law requires crime victims to be notified of any significant court proceedings in their case.
Lee, who was not the initial judge in the case, inserted himself into the matter six years after Mario Lorenzo White pleaded guilty to statutory rape and after White had been paroled. Lee threw out White's statutory rape conviction at the urging of Parnell Odom, a lawyer representing White, according to court records.
Odom did not return calls or emails seeking comment.
White, a scholarship athlete, was initially indicted for rape, aggravated child molestation, statutory rape and other sexual offenses for having sex with a 14-year-old on the grounds of East Coweta High School in March 2003. According to court records, White, who was then 19, had sex with the victim in a storage shed.
The case was assigned to Superior Court Judge Quillian Baldwin, who accepted White's guilty plea to statutory rape on March 15, 2004. The victim's father told Baldwin he did not want White to be allowed to plead guilty only to the statutory rape charge. He asked that the case instead go to trial on the more serious charges.
The victim told Baldwin she met White "to kiss or make out, but I did not go in there to have sex with him."
White said the sex was consensual. "I didn't force her to do anything," he told the judge.
Assistant District Attorney Chuck Boring told Baldwin it was tough case to prosecute because it was "a he-said, she-said. ... It's a difficult case from my standpoint because nobody's going to be happy."
But Boring said the statutory rape charge was "a slam dunk" because White had admitted to having sex with a girl who was younger than 16 years old.
Baldwin meted out a tough sentence -- 10 years, five to be served in prison. "I just feel like that we've got to send a message to these kinds of cases,"he said.
White, who did not serve his entire five-year prison sentence, was paroled in October 2005 and by early 2010 he had retained Odom, a lawyer in Newnan.
On Feb. 16, 2010, Lee signed an order that said, "The court on its own motion for good cause having been shown, hereby vacates the judgment of conviction of the defendant, Mario Lorenzo White." A review of White's case file gave no further explanation as to why Lee entered such an order. It contained no transcript of any proceedings that led up to the decision.
On that same day, White pleaded "nolo contendre" -- meaning he did not contest the charge -- to child cruelty. Without a statutory rape conviction, White no longer had to register as a sex offender. At that time there were severe restrictions as to where a registered sex offender could live and work.
It's unclear when the district attorney's office found out about the change in White's sentence. But on April 1, 2010, in an order prepared by a prosecutor after the district attorney's found out about the deal, Lee corrected his prior order, saying it "was entered in error." He reinstated the original guilty plea to statutory rape and the sentence imposed by Baldwin.
On Friday, Baldwin said he did not know at the time that Lee had thrown out White's initial conviction. He declined to comment any further.
"I really don't want to get into that darned thing," Baldwin said. "It's kind of a sad situation."
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