Owen Labrie, the prep school student who was convicted of sexual assault in October and sentenced to one year in prison, was jailed on Friday for breaking his court-imposed curfew.
According to The New York Times, the 20-year-old was out on $15,000 bail, pending an appeal, and required to be at his mother's house in Vermont from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. However, officials started to suspect he was not adhering to his curfew after a reporter spotted him on a train in Boston last month.
The reporter, Susan Zalkind, wrote about the encounter for Vice and tweeted on February 29, "In the last few weeks he’s been slowly re-entering society, he tells me. He’s been traveling to Cambridge frequently.”
Labrie’s lawyer, Jaye Rancourt, admitted that he violated his curfew, but said he had done so to attend classes related to online-education courses and to meet with his trial lawyers. Rancourt also said that Zalkind "accosted" her client and that his comments were off the record, but also showed he did not break his curfew that specific day.
According to Boston.com, the prosecutor said there was surveillance footage, as well as ticket stubs and credit card receipts, as evidence that Labrie had broken curfew. A bus ticketing agent also declared that Labrie said he was headed to Boston to visit his girlfriend on at least one occasion.
In the end, the judge revoked his bail and sentenced him to a 12-month sentence at the Merrimack County House of Corrections, explaining that it didn't matter why he broke his curfew, all that mattered was he did.
Labrie was sentenced to a year in prison in October after he was acquitted of felony sexual assault charges, but convicted of having sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was an 18-year-old senior at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire. He will have to register as a sex offender for life, though he can petition to have it removed after 15 years.
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