MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. -- A judge ignored a former teacher's sobbing pleas for mercy Friday and sentenced her to seven years in prison on charges that she sent explicit photos to a young teenager while on probation for having sex with him.
When Pamela Rogers, 29, was released after serving 198 days in jail, she was under orders not to contact the student or his family or use the Internet. But authorities say that even after appearing in court on a charge of violating her probation in April, she continued talking with the boy and sending him text messages and sexually explicit photos and video of herself.
"You have done everything except show this court that you wanted to rehabilitate yourself," Warren County Circuit Judge Bart Stanley said. He revoked Rogers' probation and ordered her to serve the rest of a seven-year prison sentence that had been largely suspended.
Officers led Rogers away after she stood before the judge handcuffed and shackled. She cried as she asked for mercy and apologized to her family, the teen's family, her relatives and friends.
"I have humiliated myself. What I did was wrong," Rogers said. "I am willing to do anything to rehabilitate myself."
Rogers, who has been in jail since April, presented evidence in a hearing Friday, including a clinical psychologist who said she was a sex addict. She apologized tearfully and was led away in handcuffs to a women's prison in Nashville.
Rogers worked as a physical education teacher at Centertown Elementary School, which the boy, now 14, attended.
She was first arrested in February 2005 and pleaded no contest to charges of statutory rape and sexual battery by an authority figure. Records in the case said she had intercourse and oral sex with the student.
A grand jury issued a new indictment against Rogers last week charging her with four counts of exploiting a minor. The judge set a Nov. 22 arraignment on those charges.
Rogers' mother asked the judge for leniency in a letter, saying a bad marriage had destabilized her daughter emotionally.
"No one would have done that if they were of normal mind," Karen Rogers wrote in the letter, obtained Friday by The Associated Press.
She said her daughter's ex-husband, Chris Turner, had subjected her to "mental, verbal and emotional abuse" and threatened to kill her. Turner's attorney Mike Galligan called the letter "the statements of a desperate mother."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/14/AR2006071401111.html
