Posted on 02/02/2007 1:28:37 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Acclaimed geneticist William French Anderson was sentenced Friday to 14 years in prison for molesting an employee's daughter who took martial arts classes at his home.
Before sentencing, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael E. Pastor noted an extraordinary number of letters supporting Anderson, including one from a Nobel Prize winner.
But the judge said Anderson had caused "incalculable" emotional damage to a victim he described as an insecure and trusting immigrant.
"Because of intellectual arrogance, he persisted and he got away with as much as he could," the judge said.
Anderson, 70, was convicted last July of one count of continuous sexual abuse of a child under age 14 and three counts of committing a lewd act upon a child. He had faced a maximum sentence of 22 years in prison.
Prosecutors said Anderson molested the girl from 1997 to 2001, starting when she was 10 years old.
Anderson watched intently as his victim, now 19, read a statement before he was sentenced.
"Roughly three years ago, I wanted to kill myself," she said. "I couldn't live with all the pain ... He maliciously destroyed my world to fulfill his own sick pleasures."
Anderson was Time magazine's runner-up for Man of the Year in 1995. He has been called the "father of gene therapy" for his work on a promising but controversial experimental medical treatment that involves injecting healthy genes into sick patients.
He claimed to be the first person to successfully treat a patient with the therapy in 1990, launching the field, although the claim has been disputed.
Defense attorneys argued during Anderson's three-week trial that he was a friendly mentor to the girl and was being smeared by her mother, who wanted to assume Anderson's position as director of the Gene Therapies Laboratories at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine.
Anderson, a resident of wealthy San Marino, resigned last September and is no longer on its faculty, then university said.
The judge ordered Anderson, who has been in custody since hi conviction, to undergo a 90-day diagnostic evaluation before sentencing.
In e-mails and a tape-recorded conversation played for jurors during the trial, the girl angrily confronted Anderson about the sexual abuse.
Anderson told the girl, "I just did it, just something in me was just evil," according to the tape recording made by authorities who attached a wire to the girl.
Defense attorney Barry Tarlow said during the trial that Anderson was guilty only of pressuring the child to do well in school.
In court, Anderson said he thought the confrontation was about the emotional abuse he'd inflicted on her.
"If you cause somebody to crash, flunk out, that's just evil," he said. "When I realized she was falsely accusing me of sexual abuse, then I said whatever I had to say to get out of there."
Ouch!
California's upper crust Liberals at work.
One Liberal off the streets.
Didn't Michael J. Fox support this gene treatment theory before he got onto stem cells?
Actually, gene therapy has never really panned out very well as a cure for much of anything. It was really hyped at the time. There are a few (very few) short term improvements with it for single gene diseases, but nothing much that seems to last very long. The hype reminds of the embryonic stem cell hype today.
He shouldda stuck with the genes and stayed outta the jeans.
I'm not sure how one would tell he is a liberal -- was there something in the article?
"I just did it, just something in me was just evil,"
His genes made him do it. He can blame that prison time on his genes.
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