A judge in Iowa has ordered a teenage sex-trafficking victim who stabbed her accused rapist to death to pay $150,000 in restitution to the man’s family and sentenced her to five years of closely supervised probation.
In June 2020 Pieper Lewis was 15 years old when she stabbed 37-year-old, Zachary Brooks, more than 30 times in a Des Moines apartment.
Lewis, aged 17 now, was initially charged with first-degree murder for fatally stabbing someone. Last year, she plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter and willful injury instead. Both charges come with a 10-year prison sentence maximum.
Polk County District Court Judge David M. Porter deferred Lewis’ imprisonment sentence on Tuesday, allowing her to be sent to prison if she breaches her probation.
The judge ruled that Lewis was required to pay the estate of her rapist due to “no other choice,” adding that Iowa state law compels restitution.
According to the New York Times, Porter said that she will be moved to a halfway house in Des Moines where she will wear a GPS tracking device. This is to ensure that she does not return “back into the lifestyle that you thus far left,” from which she supposedly just left. In addition, She will also have complete 200 hours of community service as part of her requirements
The girl, who was 15 years old at the time, had fled an abusive stepmother and been sleeping in the hallways of a building when Christopher Brown, 28, took her in and began prostituting her out, authorities said. According to Lewis, who raped her multiple times in the weeks before she killed him
The girl said she was forced at knifepoint to go to Brooks’ apartment to have sex with him. After Brooks raped her again, she grabbed a knife from a bedside table and killed him.
Both police and prosecutors agree that Lewis was sexually assaulted, but according to prosecutors, she murdered Brooks after he was asleep and posed no danger to Lewis.
For the last two years, Lewis has been kept in a juvenile detention center and earned her GED. Being there restricted her communication with friends and family.
“My spirit has been burned, but still glows through the flames,” she said before her sentencing “Hear me roar, see me glow, and watch me grow.”
“I am a survivor,” she continued.
The prosecutor’s office disagreed with Lewis referring to herself as a victim during the trial. They said she did not accept responsibility for Brooks’ death and leaving his children fatherless.
Lewis answered questions from the court about her decisions that resulted in Brooks’ stabbing.
“I took a person’s life,” she said. “My intentions that day were not to just to go out and take somebody’s life. In my mind, I felt that I wasn’t safe and I felt that I was in danger, which resulted in the acts. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that a crime was committed.”
She stated that she regretted what occurred on that day, “but to say there is one victim is absurd.”
Iowa does not have a safe-harbor statute, which offers trafficking victims some measure of criminal immunity in the dozens of other US states that do.
The state of Iowa does have an affirmative defense statute, which offers some flexibility to victims if they were the offenders “under compulsion by another’s threat of serious injury, provided that the defendant reasonably believed that such injury was imminent.”
Tuesday, prosecutors contended that by pleading guilty to manslaughter and willful injury, Lewis had given up her right to self-defense.
