Thursday, March 31, 2016
Associated Press
PITTSBURGH
One of three teachers charged with having inappropriate sexual relationships with students at a western Pennsylvania high school has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to 11/2 to three years in prison.
Allegheny County Judge David Cashman had threatened to reject Wednesday’s plea agreement with Jason Cooper, 39, of Monroeville, but relented to spare the victim – who is now in college – from having to testify.
“I’m half-tempted to reject this plea. I don’t think it’s sufficient to punish you for what you’ve done,” Judge Cashman said. “You are dangerous.”
Cooper was the first of three male Plum High School teachers scheduled for trial after being charged last year with having inappropriate relationships with female students. A fourth teacher is charged with trying to intimidate one of the purported victims by pointing her out in class last year, and District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. has said a grand jury was investigating whether school administrators properly handled the allegations, but has yet to announce its findings.
Under the plea agreement, Cooper pleaded guilty to a felony charge of corruption of minors, furnishing alcohol to a minor and intimidating a witness. The intimidation charge was filed after Cooper contacted the student while free on bond awaiting trial. Prosecutors dropped charges of institutional sexual assault and a lesser corruption-of-minors count.
“I’m sorry for what I put everyone in my life through. I just want to move past this and hope everyone can heal from my mistake,” said Cooper, who also will surrender his teaching license, spend five years on probation and register as a sex offender.
Defense attorney Michael DeRiso had argued the institutional-sexual-assault charge didn’t apply because the student was 18 before she consented to have sex. But Zappala’s office claimed the charge was appropriate because Cooper allegedly “groomed” the girl for sex by having a relationship with her before she became an adult.
Institutional sexual assault assumes that students aren’t legally able to consent to sex with teachers due to their in-school roles.
“This case is over, and that’s what my client wanted,” DeRiso said after the plea.
“You behaved like a frat boy instead of a mature, married, middle-aged man,” said Assistant District Attorney Brian Catanzarite, reading from a victim-impact statement written by the student and her family. “It’s only to save our child from more pain that we agreed to this plea.”
Catanzarite said Cooper contacted the girl by phone and on social media in late 2014 after she began struggling with deaths in her family. They began kissing in his classroom, and he served her liquor when she visited Cooper’s home. They had sex after she helped Cooper move into an apartment early last year after he separated from his wife, the prosecutor said.