photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Richard Eugene Marshall at a hearing on Oct. 30, 2023, in Douglas County District Court.

A Lawrence man was granted probation on Thursday in Douglas County District Court in a case in which he was accused of providing methamphetamine and other drugs to two teens before he sexually assaulted them. The sentence followed statements to the court from one victim and her mother asking that the man be sent to prison.

The defendant, Richard Eugene Marshall, 50, was originally charged with multiple counts of aggravated endangerment of a child, but after his preliminary hearing in October of 2021, the state increased the charges to multiple sex crimes involving two teen girls in addition to the endangerment charges. Charging documents said the incidents occurred between August and December of 2020.

Marshall pleaded no contest in June of 2023 to two counts of aggravated sexual battery in connection with one of the girls after numerous continuances and failing to appear for court multiple times, according to court records. He went through multiple attorneys. In one case he claimed that attorney Michael Clarke forced him to take a plea agreement from the state and that he wanted to go to trial, as the Journal-World reported.

However, on Thursday with his new attorneys, Allyson Monson and Gary West with the Douglas County Public Defender’s Office, he followed through with the plea agreement and was sentenced on the sexual battery charges.

The midlevel felony convictions with Marshall’s criminal history put him in the “border box” on the Kansas sentencing guidelines, which meant that Judge Amy Hanley could decide whether to grant him probation or send him to prison.

The state, represented most recently in the case by Senior Assistant District Attorney Ricardo Leal, had agreed in the plea agreement to support a 36-month term of probation for Marshall with an underlying sentence of 64 months in prison. Leal asked the court to order Marshall to undergo additional periodic sex-offender assessments to ensure he was not a risk to the community.

Before Hanley, conducting the hearing via Zoom, handed down the sentence, she heard from psychologist Seth Wescott, of Overland Park, who performed a psycho-sexual assessment on Marshall and determined that Marshall had a low-level risk of reoffending and that with regular therapy he would likely become a contributing member of society. The court also heard from two of Marshall’s friends, who said he was a caring person, and from Monson, who said that Marshall was employed and attending therapy.

Marshall declined to speak on his own behalf.

Then Leal read a statement from the victim, who said that when she was young she looked up to Marshall, and as she grew into a teen she began to struggle with her mental health and in school and looked to Marshall for support.

Instead, she said, Marshall led her into his bedroom, locked the door, took a hit from a meth pipe and and blew the smoke into her mouth.

“I let the cloud of smoke out and almost immediately I felt so different. I felt like I could do everything I didn’t want to before. I guess I can even say I felt a little better, but only for that split second. Not long after that everything changed,” she wrote.

In the following months Marshall would continue to give the girl methamphetamine and initiated inappropriate touching.

“I would wake up feeling his sandpaper like hands wandering my body. While he thought I was unconscious. He would lay and caress me while I pretended to be asleep with tears rolling down my face,” the woman, now 20 but 16 at the time, wrote.

The woman wrote that recovering from the meth addiction and the molestation has been traumatic.

“I still wake up in fear that someone’s waiting to prey on me. I have horrible sick dreams about what happened to me in that house,” the woman wrote.

She said she lost friends and family because she was too afraid and embarrassed to tell anyone what was happening.

“People will see him for who he really is, a predator to children and women. The prime example of what a man should never be,” she wrote.

She said her trauma was exacerbated “by the system who has given him chance after chance during this process,” and that “I’ve been through such pain for long enough just for him to prove to everyone he’s not capable of being a human being or a good person.”

Leal also read a letter from the woman’s mother, who wrote that she thought Marshall could be trusted, even though he had made a lot of bad choices in his life.

“He introduced (girls) to drugs and alcohol and chose to violate them, getting them addicted where they had to work their way off of meth,” she wrote.

“His actions have taken the girls’ innocence, and for the longest time, their drive to succeed, to grow, and make something of their lives,” she wrote.

She said that Marshall has continued his harassing behavior.

“I pray he is sentenced to the maximum sentence possible that can be given. After delaying this process and taking advantage of the court system, I feel he will not get what is deserved for what he took so easily away. I hope for more. He deserves more. May he rot from the inside out,” the mother wrote.

Hanley said that she had to weigh the recommendations from the state and the sex-offender evaluator’s testimony, which both supported the notion Marshall wasn’t a risk to the community, against the harm that had already been done to the community.

She said that since the attorneys on both sides recommended probation and that they were more familiar with the facts of the case, she would follow their recommendations and grant the nonprison sentence. She sentenced him to 32 months on each count to run consecutively for a total of 64 months, just over 5 years, then suspended that sentence to 36 months of probation.

Hanley’s decision, however, came with a warning.

“This does not minimize your actions,” Hanley said to Marshall.

She said she had grave concerns with Marshall being allowed to go free and that she expected strict compliance with his probation terms.

“If there are alleged violations, this will be coming back to me,” Hanley said.

She said that usually a probation violation would be heard by a different court that focuses on probation matters but that in Marshall’s case she would be sure that if something did happen, she would be the one who heard the allegations.

Marshall is also required to register as a sex offender for 25 years and will be required to be on post-release supervision for the rest of his life, in accordance with Kansas law.

photo by: Mugshot courtesy of the Kansas Sex Offender Registry

Richard Eugene Marshall is pictured with the Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center.