The movement to unseat a local judge for her sentencing record has produced another angry mother.

But this one’s not upset about what Douglas County District Judge Paula Martin is doing in the courtroom. This mother is upset that an anti-Martin group last week used her 12-year-old daughter’s case to portray Martin as lax on sex offenders.

“They’re using it in a way I don’t want them to use it because we were happy with the outcome,” the mother said. “Who are they to second-guess? We’re not angry at Judge Martin.”

The mother also said she was upset that she had to relive the case.

“All the emotion came back,” she said.

2000 case

The Justice for Children Committee last week produced a list of 15 cases, including several sex crimes, in which it felt Martin had treated defendants with too much leniency. It was an effort by the group to show the movement to oust Martin on Nov. 2 is based on more than her decision earlier this year to grant probation sentences to three men convicted of having sex with an intoxicated 13-year-old girl.

One of the cases on the list was that of Marconi Lopez, a 22-year-old charged in spring 2000 with proposing sex to a 12-year-old girl over the Internet. The anti-Martin literature said Martin gave Lopez “only 12 months’ probation.”

But that’s what the girl’s family wanted. The girl’s mother, a Kansas University employee, said the charges resulted from her daughter’s experimentation with meeting people on the Internet — something she’d already been in trouble for doing when she began chatting with Lopez.

When the mother discovered they’d been exchanging sexual e-mail messages, she called police. She said officers told her after they arrested Lopez that he didn’t seem dangerous, and she agreed.

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“He just seemed like a kid who got caught up in the moment on the Internet,” she said. “I think he was so mortified that he got caught doing this, and I can’t believe he could do it again.”

Second-guessing

After reporting the crime, the mother said she began to second-guess her decision.

“It started this process that I could not stop, and the process was horrible,” she said. “I felt for both my kid and that kid, so I was trying to do what I thought was best for everybody, including him because he’s somebody’s kid, too.”

She began working with prosecutors to reach a plea agreement that would satisfy all parties. Eventually, Lopez entered a plea to a charge of misdemeanor child endangerment, and the mother said Martin followed her wishes at sentencing by not sending Lopez to jail.

“This was an incident where I thought she did exactly what she should have done,” the mother said.

Lopez was ordered to undergo a sex offender treatment class as a condition of probation.

Anti-Martin response

Becca Booth, treasurer of the anti-Martin group, said Thursday she didn’t think it was right to call Lopez a “kid.” She said too many people were viewing adults — such as the 18-year-old men convicted of rape in the case of the intoxicated 13-year-old — as “kids.”

Booth said her group also was angry that Martin didn’t order Lopez to have no contact with children while he was on probation.

“Regardless of the situation, the fact is a 22-year-old man solicited a 12-year-old girl on the Internet and was not issued a no-contact with children during his probation because they thought ‘This guy is a good guy. He just messed up.'” Boothe said. “How are we to know that?”

After considering the issue further, Booth said Friday the anti-Martin group would stop using the Lopez case in its literature.