A 17-year-old girl, Pieper Lewis has been sentenced to five years in prison for stabbing her alleged 37-year-old rapist, Zachary Brooks to death.
Miss Lewis was sentenced on Tuesday for the incident that occurred in June 2020.
According to the Iowa court judgment, Lewis would pay her victim’s family the sum of $150,000 as compensation.
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Earlier, CBS reported that she was a human trafficking victim and was charged with first-degree murder after she stabbed Brooks to death in 2020.
Lewis pleaded guilty in a court hearing in 2021 to involuntary manslaughter and willful injury for killing Brooks who resided in Des Moines, Iowa, United States of America.
Both charges were punishable by 10 years in imprisonment, but Lewis got a five-year jail term and would be on closely supervised probation.
Polk County District Judge, David M. Porter on Tuesday deferred the above prison sentences, that is, if Lewis violates any part of her probation, she could automatically serve a 20-year jail term.
Ruling on the payment of the estate of her rapist, “This court is presented with no other option,” Porter said.
Restitution is mandatory under Iowa law that has been authorised by the Iowa Supreme Court.
Lewis was 15-year-old as at the time she stabbed Brooks more than 30 times in a Des Moines apartment.
The officials disclosed Lewis was a runaway who was thriving to escape an abusive life given by her adopted mother.
Lewis slept in the hallways of a Des Moines apartment building when a 28-year-old man took her in and then forcibly trafficked her to other men for sex.
Lewis said one of those men was Brooks and that he had raped her multiple times in the weeks before his death. She recounted being forced at knifepoint by the 28-year-old man to go with Brooks to his apartment for sex.
She told officials that after Brooks had raped her again, she grabbed a knife from a bedside table and stabbed Brooks out of rage.
Although police and prosecutors didn’t dispute that Lewis was sexually assaulted and trafficked, the prosecutors held that Brooks was asleep when he was stabbed and hence he was not an immediate danger to Lewis.
“My spirit has been burned, but still glows through the flames. Hear me roar, see me glow, and watch me grow. I am a survivor,” Lewis said during her trial.
Porter’s ruling said; “The next five years of your life will be full of rules you disagree with, I’m sure of it. This is the second chance that you’ve asked for. You don’t get a third.”
