Lavell Hollenbeck is mentally impaired, but he also committed an egregious crime that dramatically altered the life of a young teen.
Weighing those two factors made arriving at an appropriate sentence for the 21-year-old Maplewood man who raped a drunken 15-year-old girl in the fall of 2015 extraordinarily challenging, Ramsey County District Judge Joy Bartscher said before announcing her decision in court Friday.
“I think there is often an expectation that we as judges have some kind of magical power to know what is right to do … (in hard cases like this),” Bartscher said.
They don’t, she added just before handing down a 12-year prison sentence to the young father for his conviction of one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. The term is within state sentencing guidelines and matched the request of state prosecutors on the case. It was considerably longer than what the defense hoped would be handed down.
Arguing that doctors had found Hollenbeck to be mentally impaired and extremely limited in his capacity to understand the consequences of his actions, Hollenbeck’s defense attorney, Michelle Anna Speeter Margoles, said her client would be better served in the sex offender treatment program to which he’d recently been accepted. The program, she said, has offerings specifically aimed at helping offenders with impaired intellectual development to become rehabilitated and better understand how to do the right thing.
In that vein, she asked the judge to consider a departure from state sentencing guidelines.
Hollenbeck was convicted of raping a 15-year-old girl while the two were at the St. Paul house of one of her friends on Oct. 15, 2015. The girl had been drinking with a group of people, including Hollenbeck, whom she had never met before, and eventually passed out. When she awoke, she was covered in bruises and naked from the waist down.
At school a few days later, she learned that someone had posted a sexually explicit video of her on Facebook that showed Hollenbeck having sex with her while other juveniles placed their hands over her mouth as she urged him to stop.
That’s when she realized she’d been raped, court documents say.
At one point in the video, the girl can be heard saying “Oww” and attempting to push Hollenbeck off. Instead, he continues while making crude comments and flashing gang signs to the camera.
Hollenbeck later told police he thought the girl’s requests for him to stop were related to how deeply he was sexually penetrating her at the time, not because she wanted the activity in general to stop.
Hollenbeck did not know someone intended to upload the video to Facebook, he said.
The father of one apologized for his actions in court Friday and said he wished he could “go back in time” and erase them. He added that he wants to be a better person for his own young daughter.
The 15-year-old’s father spoke about how the experience has changed his formerly joyful daughter into a girl weighed down by depression and deep shame. Her mother said she wakes in the night worried the girl will commit suicide.
“She is physically free but mentally she is not,” her father said. “She is in counseling … taking medications, (but) she won’t (ever) be the same. It’s hard every day … I feel like I wasn’t a good enough father. I should have been there to protect her.”
Bartscher’s deliberations were influenced by recent findings related to phone calls Hollenbeck made to his mother and a friend from jail. In one he referred to the teen he assaulted as a “ho.” In another, he advised a friend to get a gun from his house and go shoot at the girl’s home.
Margoles said her client didn’t know the calls were being recorded and that while his statements were indefensible, she said she believed he was just venting hard emotions and posturing and that he didn’t really mean what he said. She added that Hollenbeck doesn’t own a gun.
Still, Bartscher said the calls were too concerning to ignore, considering the rest of his actions, despite his low mental aptitude.
“He still doesn’t get it … and I don’t know if it’s (due) to (his mental health issues) … or if it’s because of posturing, but it’s really scary,” she said.
That led her to determine it was in the best interest of public safety to send him to prison, even if he might gain more personally from the recommended sex offender treatment program, Bartscher said.
“I, in no way, think this somehow magically fixes him, because I don’t think it does,” she said.