Lewis’s case has also sparked attention, outrage and calls for her release. She has been held in juvenile detention since her arrest in June 2020.
Cyntoia Brown spent 15 years in prison for killing a man who paid for sex with her while she was trafficked at age 16. Then, in 2019, after advocates rallied to her side in the wake of the #MeToo movement, her sentence was commuted and she was released. Her story helped draw attention to teenagers with similar stories, leading some authorities to reconsider how they should be treated.
Days after being born, her attorneys wrote in court documents, she returned to a hospital severely malnourished. She was placed in foster care, her parents’ rights were terminated and then she was adopted by Billy and Leslie Lewis. When the couple divorced in 2019, Pieper Lewis, then in middle school, began acting out. Her mother reacted with what Lewis’s attorneys called “draconian parenting measures,” removing her bedroom door and forcing her to sleep on a mattress on the floor.
In April 2020, another resident of the complex, a 28-year-old man, moved Lewis into his unit in the building. He began arranging for her to have sex with men, she wrote in her plea. Among them was Brooks, with whom she was forced to spend three days in May 2020. She said he assaulted her multiple times.“I did not want to have sex with Mr. Brooks because I believed that [the 28-year-old man] was my boyfriend,” she wrote. “I did not want to go to Mr.
He gave her alcohol and told her to undress. She wrote that she hoped he would fall asleep: “I tried to remain calm and kept thinking he will pass out and I will leave his apartment at first light.” He assaulted her five times before falling asleep, according to what she said in her plea. They said the case required balancing rehabilitation against protection of the community. While noting that they had not disputed Lewis’s claims of being trafficked, they said that in killing him, she had taken matters into her own hands, leaving Brooks’s children without a father.Matthew Sheeley, one of Lewis’s lawyers, argued that her actions were directly tied to her status as a victim of human trafficking.
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