Quincy, the county seat of Adams County in downstate Illinois, is a quiet town. Here residents vote conservative, prize neighborliness and don’t raise voices. Controversy isn’t courted.
But that changed when a judge reversed his guilty judgment in a sexual assault trial that has raised a loud outcry. National media took notice when Quincy Area Network Against Domestic Abuse (Quanada), whose board I sit on, expressed its outrage over the verdict.
Quanada provides services to victims of domestic and sexual violence in west central Illinois.
At a sentencing hearing Jan. 3, Adams County Judge Robert Adrian overturned his October decision that found 18-year-old Drew Clinton guilty. He declared the state’s mandatory minimum sentence of four years for rape was too much. By this time, Clinton had served 148 days in the county jail.
“For what happened in this case, that is plenty of punishment,” he said.
The case involves a 16-year-old high school student who attended a graduation party, where she said she got drunk and swam in the pool in her underwear. She fell asleep on a friend’s couch and woke up to find a pillow over her head and Clinton on top of her.
After overturning his verdict, the judge chastised the victim, the victim’s parents and the parents whose house hosted the party. He blamed everyone except Clinton.
“This is what’s happened when parents do not exercise their parental responsibilities, when we have people, adults, having parties for teenagers, and they allow coeds and female people to swim in their underwear in their swimming pool,” Adrian said. “And, no, underwear is not the same as swimming suits,” he said, according to court transcripts.
It might have ended there except Quanada’s director, Megan Duesterhaus, was alerted to the verdict and issued a statement signed by all organization board members.
“The judgment reinforces the fact that standards for women have always been impossibly high while they are impossibly low for men. … Shame the victims, free the rapists,” the statement said.