A judge unleashed searing remarks Friday as she sentenced former sheriff’s deputy Ernest Justin Blanchette to a decade in prison for raping an inmate during transport, telling him he had shaken the justice system “to its bedrock” and dismissing his request for probation as “completely untethered to the reality of the situation.”
“You disgraced yourself, your children, your wife, your family,” said Judge Gillian Abramson of Hillsborough Superior Court North, in Manchester. “You disgraced all corrections officers who do a professional job, who make themselves a target just by putting on their uniform and driving to work.”
“This was not a mistake,” Abramson added. “This was a clear pattern of abuse.”
Blanchette, 36, who still faces a ream of related charges in Belknap County, remained upright and composed as she spoke. Minutes earlier he delivered an emotional plea to the court, apologizing directly to the inmate and telling Abramson “at no point did I believe she felt coerced.”
“Had I known that, I… this never… we wouldn’t be here today, your honor,” he said. “I truly am sorry to her for having felt that. That’s not who I am.”
A jury last month found that Blanchette had used his authority to coerce the woman into sex last year while driving her to the prison in Goffstown. Blanchette admitted the encounter, but both he and the woman said it had been consensual. Prosecutors countered that the woman was incapable of legally consenting at the time, and that Blanchette had been grooming her for months with gifts like cigarettes and the use of his phone.
Abramson’s sentence was the maximum prosecutors had sought, though she agreed to suspend the final two years if Blanchette completes sex offender treatment. The defense had asked for a fully-suspended 10-year term.
In announcing the decision, Abramson said she had considered input from all sides, including Blanchette’s statements and remarks from his father, who was critical of the inmate and also of the media’s coverage of the case, which he described as sensationalist.
“The victim here I have a hard time calling a victim,” the father, Ernest Blanchette, said. “Engaging in consensual sex with someone you find attractive, and admit they also wanted to, is not rape.”
But Abramson could not have disagreed more.
“Whether she was willing or not – and I’ve heard a lot about this today… whether she was willing or not is completely irrelevant, legally and morally,” she said.
“Inmates are degraded enough by virtue of incarceration,” Abramson said, adding: “By trading favors for sex, you degraded her even more.”
The younger Blanchette, a former Marine with a upstanding record, said his arrest and all that has followed – including a pending divorce, the loss of visitation with his children and near-continuous solitary confinement in jail over the past month – have combined into “the most devastating event in my life.” He spoke tearfully of a previously undisclosed encounter from recent years in which a person committed suicide in front of him, recalling, “There was nothing I could do to stop him.”
“Ever since that day, I don’t ever – ever – want anybody to ever feel that way around me,” Blanchette said. “I don’t want anybody to feel useless. I don’t want anybody to feel like ‘a scumbag.’”
The last part was a reference to remarks the victim had given a few minutes before. Reading from a handwritten statement, she told Blanchette to take responsibility and try to “stay busy” in prison.
“Do your time,” she said, adding, “I know how it feels to be sitting in that chair.”
(Jeremy Blackman can be reached at 369-3319, jblackman@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @JBlackmanCM.)