Eighteen-year-old Kaitlyn Hunt, the Florida teenager charged with two felony counts of lewd and lascivious battery, will not accept a plea deal which would have put her on house arrest for two years and labeled her as a sex offender. Hunt, a high school senior, is being charged of the crimes for having had sex with her 14-year-old girlfriend. If she is convicted, she could go to jail for 15 years.
The case has attracted media attention after Hunt's family posted comments on Facebook describing the case and implying that the other girl's family was going after Hunt because she is gay. The victim's family has since denied the accusation. The father, Jim Smith, told a CNN affiliate WPEC that his daughter's innocence was taken away and that "there deserves some type of punishment for that". He says he and his wife twice warned Hunt to stay away from their daughter, who later began to act out against them. One morning, the Smiths discovered her daughter missing, only to later learn Hunt had picked her up. "We had no other alternative but to turn to the law, use it basically as a last resort," Smith said.
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On Wednesday, Hunt spoke to the press for the first time, saying, ""I'm scared of losing my life, the rest of my life and not being able to go to college or be around kids (or) be around my sisters and my family."
Hunt's attorney, Julia Graves, said in a statement to the Huffington Post, "This is a situation of two teenagers who happen to be of the same sex involved in a relationship. If this case involved a boy and girl, there would be no media attention to this case. ... If this incident occurred 108 days earlier when she was 17, we wouldn't even be here."
The American Civil Liberties Union has issued statements in defense of her, and an online petition on Change.org in support of Hunt has attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures.
According to CNN, a felony child abuse conviction would mean that, among other things, Hunt would have to disclose that she is an ex-felon on employment applications and possibly become ineligible for student loans or adoption of a child.
Her attorney had earlier asked for the sentence to be reduced to a misdemeanor, and released a statement calling it "a life sentence for behavior that is all too common, whether male, female, gay, straight."
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