Mother, boyfriend sentenced for having sex in front of daughter

PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- A woman and her boyfriend were sentenced to three years' probation for having intercourse in front of the woman's 9-year-old daughter to teach the girl about sex.
A state prosecutor recommended jail time, but Chief Family Court Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah Jr. spared the couple time behind bars, saying he did not want to put the girl, who is now 11, through the ordeal of testifying at a trial.
David Prata, 33, and Rebecca Arnold, 37, entered no-contest pleas to felony child neglect charges and were given suspended prison sentences of three years, in addition to the probation time.
"I was outraged as to what they did," Jeremiah said during a court hearing. "I could not believe that any person would do what they did in front of a child."
But "in weighing the interest of the child," Jeremiah said he did not want to put the girl through a trial.
"In order for the state to prove the case," the judge said, "the child would have to come in and testify, and we'd have to put the child through a rigorous cross-examination, and I assume she would have to describe what acts they committed, what they did and how they did it and how it affected her. And it would bother me to put the child through that type of examination."
Prata and Arnold were accused of habitually neglecting the girl in 2004 "by providing an environment that is lewd and depraved in a manner that makes their home unfit for the child to live," court records show.
The allegations came to light in December 2004, when the child abuse hotline received a call from a Massachusetts teacher who said the girl had recently come to live with her biological father after spending the summer with her mother in Woonsocket, court records show. The girl told the teacher that her mother had sex with her boyfriend in front of her and that the mother did not care if the girl was watching, according to a report by a state child-protective investigator.