Jeni Lee Dinkel will serve 60 days in Kenton County jail for having sex with a 15-year-old boy last year. She must also serve five years probation and register as a sex offender for the next 20 years.
Dinkel, 51, was sentenced today by Kenton Circuit Judge Gregory Bartlett. She was charged in April with having sex with a friend of her son during a four-month period in 2006.
Under the terms of the sentence, she must also undergo psychological counseling and substance abuse treatment. She will pay a $2,500 fine plus court costs. She must also serve 200 hours of community service and she is not allowed to sell her story or profit from the case.
She must begin serving her jail sentence Oct. 5.
The victim, now 16, did not attend the hearing but was represented by Joshua Crabtree, a lawyer with the Children�s Law Center in Covington.
�He felt during the course of the proceedings � there was some assertion that he had pursued Mrs. Dinkel," said Crabtree. "He wanted to make it clear that was not ever true.
In an opinion piece from today's The Enquirer, the sentence is said to be a "slap on the wrist:"
Kenton Commonwealth Attorney Rob Sanders initially agreed to a plea bargain that involved no jail time, saying a "societal double standard" made a long sentence for Dinkel unlikely. Judge Bartlett put a stop to that deal on May 31, saying he wasn't satisfied with the presentence reports and delayed the sentencing until Tuesday.
Dinkel's jail sentence will be only half as long as the four-month relationship she acknowledged having with the victim. She must also serve five years probation, register as a sex offender for the next 20 years, attend counseling sessions and perform 200 hours of community service.
Comments posted on an Enquirer online message board during the past few months have ranged from demanding the harshest sentence to some willing to excuse the crime because the victim was a teenage boy and therefore somehow must not have suffered from the experience. After all, this line of flawed reasoning goes, the sexual contact occurred repeatedly over months last year, so the boy must not have objected. The fact that this was the calculated seduction of a 15-year-old by a 51-year-old adult seems to be lost on these people. This was an act of domination and exploitation of the adult/child relationship.
Though this sentence is short and no doubt, a male who engaged in the same behavior would probably be in jail for years, I have to give Judge Bartlett some credit for trying to change the double standards a bit:
Dinkel pleaded guilty May 31, in a plea deal that would have given her five years probation and no jail time. But the judge in the case rejected the plea deal, saying he wasn�t satisfied with the pre-sentencing reports.
Bartlett said he had to uphold public confidence in the judicial system when weighing what sentence to hand down. �Equal justice is of the law is more than a slogan,� he said. �It has to be a reality, and as far as I�m concerned, it is reality.�
Some fairness is better than none.