Three men convicted of a woman’s brutal New Year’s Day attack in 2014 will now never see the outside world again after a Superior Court judge handed down their sentenced Wednesday afternoon.
Judge Art Smith III sentenced defendants Robert Johnson and Ketorie Glover to six life sentences plus 95 years to serve in prison for the following charges:
- Aggravated Assault (2 counts) — 20 years to serve each
- Aggravated Sodomy (2 counts) — Consecutive life sentence for each
- Aggravated Sexual Battery (2 counts) — Consecutive life sentence for each
- Rape — Life sentence without the possibility of parole
- Aggravated Battery — 20 years to serve
- Kidnapping with Bodily Harm — Consecutive life sentence
- Hijacking a Motor Vehicle — 20 years to serve
- 2nd-degree Arson — 10 years to serve
- Using a Firearm to Commit a Felony — 5 years to serve
Defendant Joey Garron received five life sentences and 70 years to serve for the following charges:
- Aggravated Assault (2 counts) — 20 years to serve each
- Aggravated Sodomy (2 counts) — Consecutive life sentence for each
- Rape — Life sentence without the possibility of parole
- Aggravated Battery — Consecutive life sentence
- Kidnapping with Bodily Harm — Consecutive life sentence
- Hijacking a Motor Vehicle — 20 years to serve
- 2nd-degree Arson — 10 years to serve
Prosecutor Sadhana Dailey brought forward witnesses and recounted the details of the attack lead investigator Lt. Lance Deaton calls “one of the most, if not the most, brutal crimes [he’s] investigated.”
The victim first testified she met the three defendants at a “party house” on Garden Drive back on New Year’s Eve 2013. She told the court they all participated in a “rap battle” in her car and were having a good time until Glover and Johnson pulled out guns and forced her to start driving.
She then said Glover took over the wheel and took them to an abandoned lot on Farr Road. There the three men forced her to strip naked and performed sexual acts on her using their two weapons before repeatedly raping her.
“They had a good old time. They were passing me around like a piece of cake,” the woman said before dissolving into tears on the stand August 14.
She testified once the men were done, they attempted to force her into the trunk of her car. When she escaped, she said Johnson and Glover started firing their guns — hitting her a total of 10 times. Finally, her assailants retrieved a gas can from her trunk, doused her in gasoline, and set her on fire.
Judge Art Smith had a few choice words for the now convicted felons before issuing the maximum penalties for their crimes.
“The testimony in this case was one of the most brutal that I have heard in my tenure as a Superior Court Judge,” he said. “They treated her as an object. They treated her as disposable, and but for her enormous will to live, this might have been a murder case.”
Dailey also added she, the victim, and the woman’s family were relieved to hear the sentences read out.
“This sentence is very strong, and really sends a very strong message that the jury will believe them [victims], and that they [assailants] will be convicted, and they will be sentenced to exactly what they deserve,” she says.
Defense attorneys for Johnson, Glover, and Garron pleaded with Judge Smith in the courtroom for leniency given the defendants’ reported expressions of remorse.
“My client, like I said, handed me a letter before I started my closing. He is sincerely apologetic for what happened,” says Adam Deaver, defense attorney for Ketorie Glover.
“There’s really no way, as I said in the argument, to justify this type of conduct. The only thing that we can ask as defense attorneys is that they get a sentence appropriate of what they have done,” says Robert Johnson’s attorney Angela Dillon.
“I do believe the judge [issued this sentence] in some form or fashion, because he was trying to send a message,” says Anthony Johnson, Joey Garron’s attorney. “In his view, they serve the same level of culpability. I disagree with his viewpoint , but I understand.”
However, Prosecutor Dailey fired back that the defendants were “not sorry enough to change their pleas”, calling their acts “pure evil” — referencing a quote from the victim as she stared at the defendants during her testimony.
“They have not accepted responsibility for their crimes. They’re not sorry at all. They were sorry they got caught. They thought that they could fool a jury and the jury saw right through them,” she says.
“In all three of their police interrogation videos, they claimed the victim consented to what they did to her, knowing that they made her strip off her clothes at gunpoint, all of them saw her naked in a field with gun on her being raped and sodomized with guns. That is their version of consent.”
Dailey also referenced their past run-ins with the law, including a juvenile record for Johnson when he was found to have forced an 8-year-old girl to perform oral sex on him when he was 13.
“Robert Johnson’s juvenile adjudication for child molestation, just as in this case, he claimed the 8-year-old followed him into the room and wanted him to force her to perform oral sex on him,” Dailey told the court. “These men are a danger to women and girls and they don’t deserve to live among society again.”
