Review Is Sought on Comments by Judge About Sex and Minors
Originally published in The New York Times, June 7, 2002
A state judicial conduct committee has been asked to review comments made by a New Jersey judge that appeared to play down the impact of sex between minors and adults. The comments were made in May during a sentencing hearing in which the judge allowed a teacher who admitted having had sex with a 13-year-old boy she had taught to avoid jail time.
In a letter dated June 5, the assignment judge for Bergen County, Sybil R. Moses, asked the chairman of the State Supreme Court's Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct to review the comments of Judge Bruce A. Gaeta, who sentenced the teacher and made the comments on May 22—the teacher's birthday, coincidentally— in State Superior Court in Hackensack. Winnie Comfort, a spokeswoman for the committee chairman, Justice Alan B. Handler, said the request was being reviewed.
During the sentencing, Judge Gaeta placed the teacher, Pamela L. Diehl-Moore, 43, on five years' probation and barred her from teaching again. She pleaded guilty on Jan. 17 to a single count of sexual assault.
Children younger than 14 in New Jersey cannot legally consent to sex with adults, and Ms. Diehl-Moore admitted that she had intercourse with the boy in the summer of 1999, after he had been in her seventh-grade class at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Clifton, N.J. Ms. Diehl-Moore, a mother of two who had suffered from depression and was going through a difficult divorce at the time, developed a relationship with the boy while he acted as a baby sitter and helped her with computer problems, her lawyer said at the hearing.
Judge Gaeta and Judge Moses both declined to comment.
The prosecutor, John L. Molinelli, said he was not concerned with Judge Gaeta's comments, only with the sentence, which his office has appealed.
A transcript of the May 22 hearing quotes Judge Gaeta as saying, "It's just something between these two people that clicked beyond the teacher-student relationship."
He noted that the case's presentencing report lacked any victim impact statement, and said, "I don't see anything here that shows that this young man has been psychologically damaged by her actions."
At one point he appeared to criticize the Legislature.
"Now certainly, under the law, he is too young to legally consent," he said. But, he added: "Some of the legislators should remember when they were that age. Maybe these ages have to be changed a little bit."
Judge Gaeta also recalled his days as a prosecutor, when he would first lay eyes on 15-year-old victims in statutory rape cases, and understand the defendants' pleas of innocence.
"I see someone who looks like she's 25 years old," the judge recalled. "And the person said, 'I had no idea until later on.' Well, too bad. The law said you violated the statute."
In imposing probation only, Judge Gaeta explained that he considered it an extraordinary case, because state psychiatrists had characterized the teacher as being at risk of suicide and recommended probation with outpatient counseling, before she then attempted suicide in February.
