UPDATE | Former prep school student convicted of sex charges

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A graduate of an exclusive New England prep school was cleared of felony rape but convicted of misdemeanor sex offenses today against a 15-year-old freshman girl in a case that exposed a campus tradition in which seniors competed to see how many younger students they could have sex with.

A jury of nine men and three women took eight hours to reach its verdict in the case against 19-year-old Owen Labrie, of Tunbridge, Vt., who was accused of forcing himself on the girl in a dark and noisy mechanical room at St. Paul's School in Concord two days before he graduated in 2014.

He wept upon hearing the verdict, and his mother sobbed into a tissue.

Labrie, who was bound for Harvard and planned to take divinity classes before his arrest put everything on hold, was acquitted of the most serious charges against him – three counts of felony rape, each punishable by 10 to 20 years in prison — but was found guilty of three counts of misdemeanor sexual assault and other offenses. Each count carries up to a year behind bars.

The scandal cast a harsh light on the 159-year-old boarding school that has long been a training ground for politicians, Nobel laureates, corporate executives and other members of the country's elite.

Prosecutors said the rape was part of Senior Salute, which Labrie described to detectives as a competition in which graduating seniors tried to have sex with underclassmen and kept score on a wall behind a set of washing machines.