By Dustin Brown
The four former Christ the King students charged with having sex with an underage classmate in Queens Village last year escaped jail time Friday when a judge sentenced them to three days of community service, a defense attorney said.
The case will be dismissed in six months if the four students do not get into any further trouble, said Steven Gildin, the lawyer representing one of the four teenagers.
“It automatically is dismissed at that point unless there's some kind of new arrest,” Gildin said in a phone interview Monday.
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said Friday the alleged victim's family had consented to the plea deal.
“The proceedings have been concluded with the approval of the parents of the victim and with a view toward avoiding further emotional trauma to their daughter,” Brown said in a statement.
The four had been charged in February with sexual misconduct and endangering the welfare of a child, misdemeanor offenses that carried potential sentences of six months in prison, Brown said.
The district attorney's office did not release the boys' names – three of whom are 18 years old and a fourth 17 – because they had been charged as youthful offenders, a spokeswoman said.
The four boys were accused of having sex with the girl, who was then a 15-year-old Christ the King student, at one boy's Queens Village home on Oct. 31, Brown said at the time the charges were filed.
By statute the girl was incapable of consenting to have sex because she was younger than 17 years old, Brown said.
But Gildin disputed the relevance of those laws to the case, stressing the girl was only a year and a half younger than the boys charged with sexual misconduct.
“Nothing illegal went on here,” he said. “It's just ludicrous that it even got to this point. Adolescents have intimate experiences; that's just a fact of life. It's the birds and the bees, not a crime.”
The board of trustees for Christ the King in Middle Village voted late January to expel the four boys after the allegations surfaced, a decision Principal Michael Lynch announced to parents in a letter dated Jan. 31.
“We are clearly very disheartened by the behavior of these former students,” Lynch wrote. “We will continue to emphasize the importance of respect and the value of Christian ideals to all our students.”
Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 154.
