Century in prison for disabled teen

PARIS, Texas (TEXAS TRIBUNE) - Aaron Hart obsesses over blue Kool-Aid, WWF wrestling and puppies. He speaks in halting, incomprehensible stutters. And when his family says goodbye to him through a Plexiglas window at the Lamar County Jail, the 19-year-old with mental disabilities waves frantically and bleats, “Dad, why I gotta be in here, Dad?”

It’s a question Aaron’s family — and Texas’ entire disability rights community — has been asking for two years, ever since Aaron was arrested in his northeast Texas hometown of Paris and sentenced to 100 years in prison for performing sexual acts on a 6-year-old neighbor. An appeals court overturned the conviction this spring, ruling that Aaron pleaded guilty only because an attorney told him he would be eligible for probation. (He wasn’t.) Now Aaron sits in jail facing the same charges a second time, and his family is praying for a different outcome.

“This boy has never done anything bad in his entire life. They give a special kid like Aaron 100 years?” his 71-year-old father Robert Hart shouts, his entire body shaking. “I’ve been through a lot in my life, but never anything as hard as this.”

Aaron was diagnosed with mental retardation as a child. With an IQ of 47, the mental capacity of a kindergartner and a severe speech impediment, he was placed in special education classes but never learned to read or write. After high school graduation, he rode his bike, played video games with neighborhood kids and did odd jobs to make money. He kept a string in his pocket as a pet.

On the day he was arrested, Aaron mowed a neighbor’s lawn to make a few dollars to spend at a fair that was coming to town. The neighbor found him in the back yard with his pants down; he’d been fondling her stepson’s genitals. When the police arrived, they read Aaron his Miranda rights — later he’d ask his dad, “Who’s Miranda?” — and transported him to jail, while he continued to ask if he’d get paid for mowing the lawn.

Aaron had no previous offenses and no history of violence. At the police station, without an attorney present, he confessed to the sexual acts. Gary Young, Lamar County's district and county attorney, charged Aaron with five felony counts of sexual assault and indecency with a child, calling the incident, which Aaron’s appellate attorney says lasted just a few minutes, a “violent sexual crime.”

Aaron’s original, court-appointed attorney did little to impede the conviction. When the court’s usual psychologist found Aaron competent to stand trial, the attorney did not seek a second opinion. That took the option of institutional care settings, rather than jail, off the table. According to court records, the attorney believed Aaron would get probation — which was not legally possible considering the severity of the charges against him — and advised him to plead guilty. He signed his five-count plea in wobbly block letters.

Jurors sentenced Aaron to three 30-year prison terms and two five-year terms, one for each class of offense. They assumed Aaron would serve them concurrently. Instead, Lamar County Judge Eric Clifford stacked the sentences into one 100-year term, saying he saw no other option to protect public safety. Clifford may preside over Aaron’s upcoming proceedings, too.

It’s not the first time in recent years that the justice system in Paris has come under scrutiny. Questions of racial discrimination flared in 2006, when a 14-year-old black girl was sentenced to seven years in a youth prison for shoving a high school hall monitor. Three months earlier, the same judge sentenced a 14-year-old white girl to probation for arson. Tensions resurfaced in 2008, when a 24-year-old black man, Brandon McClelland, was dragged beneath the pickup truck of two white men until he was nearly dismembered. A local prosecutor dropped the charges, citing lack of evidence. This year, a Paris white supremacist was sentenced to 38 years in prison for targeting blacks in hate crime robberies. The man was a member of the Aryan Circle gang.

Aaron is not black. But his seemingly outrageous sentence has renewed questions about justice in the East Texas town, where the highways are dotted with “tough on crime” billboards featuring the county sheriff. Young, the district and county attorney, declined to comment for this article. Clifford, the judge who stacked Aaron’s original sentence, said he couldn’t say much because he may hear the retrial — but that the case had not created a “big stir in the community.”

“If I do [hear the case], we’ll start over with a blank slate, and if I don’t, give me a call later, and I’ll give you the exact reason why I stacked his sentences,” Clifford said. “Of course, let’s remember, Aaron is not a small child.”

For Aaron, the experience has been confounding and terrifying. His father says a seasoned offender raped Aaron in jail. Aaron was moved even farther from his family to a state prison unit, and then to an isolated facility for offenders with disabilities. Even in the face