A 20-year-old man raped two little girls. One was nine years old. The other was four or five. He raped the older girl repeatedly over the course of a year, starting on Mother's Day, in a house in Rochester, Minnesota. He told her he would buy her toys and give her money for a school book fair if she stayed quiet. A second girl came forward a year later and said he had done the same thing to her.

For that, Mohamed Bakari Shei was sentenced to 176 days in the Olmsted County jail. With good behavior, he served as little as 116 of them. He will not have to register as a sex offender. If he finishes his probation, the charges disappear from his record entirely, as if none of it ever happened.

This is not a story about one broken case in one small city. It is a story about a system, built county by county and state by state, that treats the rape of a child as a problem to be managed quietly rather than a crime to be punished seriously. Minnesota is one of the worst offenders. It is far from the only one.

Shei was 15 and 16 years old when he committed the assaults, between 2017 and 2019. He was first charged as a juvenile in 2019. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Minnesota's courts slowed to a crawl. The delay ran up against the clock: prosecutors were at risk of losing their legal window to keep the case alive in juvenile court. So the original charges were dismissed and refiled in adult court instead, where Shei, by then an adult, could be tried as one.

In exchange for not fighting his certification into adult court, prosecutors offered Shei a deal: a stay of adjudication and no prison time. He took it. In December 2022, he entered what is called an Alford plea — he did not admit guilt, but he acknowledged that the evidence against him was strong enough that a jury would almost certainly convict him. On January 30, 2023, District Judge Jacob Allen sentenced him to 176 days in jail and 30 years of probation. He was also ordered to complete a sex offender treatment program and 200 hours of community service.

A "stay of adjudication" sounds like a technical legal term, and it is, but its effect is simple and blunt: if Shei completes his probation, the conviction is wiped away. It never goes on his record. He does not have to register as a predatory offender. To the outside world, and to any future background check, it will be as though this never happened.

Olmsted County Senior Attorney Thomas Gort defended the deal, telling reporters it was designed to keep Shei from dragging out his prosecution by fighting the adult certification. Olmsted County Attorney Mark Ostrem later went further in a public interview, saying that keeping first-time offenders local and prioritizing rehabilitation over prison is simply how his office handles most cases involving children. One of Shei's victims spoke at the sentencing hearing through tears. "There is no moving on or getting over it," she said. "I've tried."

This case earned national headlines because it was so plainly disproportionate to the crime. But anyone who has followed Minnesota's courts for the past decade knows it wasn't an anomaly. It was business as usual.

In November 2016, the National Association to Protect Children released a report accusing Minnesota of having what it called "a legal culture of tolerance for sexual violence." The number behind that accusation is staggering: the group found that 65 percent of adults convicted of sexually assaulting children in Minnesota are sentenced to no prison time at all.

Two years later, the Star Tribune ran its own investigation and found 227 cases over the previous decade in which someone convicted of a felony sex assault, in a case where the state's own sentencing guidelines called for prison, instead spent less than a year in a county jail. In Hennepin County, the state's largest, nearly half of everyone convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct against a child under 13 received probation or a stay instead of prison.

The mechanism behind most of these outcomes is the stay of adjudication — the same tool used in Shei's case. Minnesota's own courts have acknowledged there is no statute that explicitly authorizes it; it exists because the state Supreme Court ruled that trial judges have the "inherent power" to grant one. When KARE 11 investigated the practice in 2017, reporters asked the Minnesota Court System for the names of people who had received a stay of adjudication in child sex cases. The court system refused to release them, citing the privacy of the offenders.

Lawmakers tried to fix this. State Representative Matt Grossell introduced bills — HF1572 and later HF87 — that would have banned stays of adjudication and imposition in criminal sexual conduct cases and required anyone who received one to register as a sex offender anyway. Both efforts stalled. Neither bill ever got a hearing in the state Senate. Child-protection advocates who tracked the legislation told reporters that even the reforms that did pass changed almost nothing: nearly 90 percent of people caught trading child sexual abuse images in Minnesota still walk away with some form of probation.

Shei's own county has kept producing similar outcomes since his case made headlines. Taylor Andrew Nelson pleaded guilty to possessing child sexual abuse images of children under 14 and received a stay of imposition — 30 days in jail, with credit for three already served. William Douglas Pirkl, a former county commission candidate, was sentenced to 30 days in jail for soliciting a minor for sex online. Danio Jay Dorres, a repeat sex offender who had already failed probation once, was given another stay and no prison time for soliciting a child, despite a prosecutor telling the judge in open court that Dorres was a threat to the public. Paul Alan Collopy molested a nine-year-old girl he was babysitting and received 30 days in jail.

And then there is the case of Tou Lue Vang, which may be the single most damning example in the state's history. In 2005, Vang pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct after repeatedly raping a girl beginning when she was 10 years old, over a span of roughly two years. He once offered her ten dollars to keep quiet. When police interviewed him, he tried to justify what he had done by claiming it was culturally normal where he was from to marry and have sex with girls as young as 12. A Ramsey County judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison — and then stayed the entire sentence, placing him on 30 years of probation instead. He never spent a day in state prison for the crime. His probation was quietly discharged in 2019.

This past summer, that case resurfaced in a different form. Facing deportation to Laos, Vang applied for a pardon. In June 2026, Minnesota's Board of Pardons — Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the state's Chief Supreme Court Justice — voted to grant it, erasing his conviction entirely. The deciding factor, according to board members, was a letter from his now-adult victim saying she had forgiven him. Homeland Security called the decision "disgusting." Weeks later, federal immigration officials deported Vang anyway, overriding the pardon's practical effect. But the pardon itself stands as a matter of Minnesota law: the state's highest officials looked at a man who raped a 10-year-old and decided his record should be wiped clean.

None of this — not Shei, not Vang, not the dozens of quieter cases sitting inside the state's court data — happened because of who these offenders were. It happened because Minnesota built a legal system with wide, largely unaccountable discretion at both the charging stage and the sentencing stage, and that system has been used, over and over, to let people who hurt children avoid real punishment.

The uncomfortable truth is that Minnesota's problem is a sharper version of a national one. Every state runs its own courts, its own sentencing guidelines, and its own plea-bargaining culture, and in state after state, the same basic failure shows up: prosecutors downgrade charges, judges exercise discretion, and the sentence that finally lands bears no real relationship to what happened to the child.

South Carolina. In October 2025, Congresswoman Nancy Mace released data her office obtained through a public records request showing that South Carolina's Attorney General had dismissed 356 of 385 child pornography and child exploitation cases in Dorchester County between 2019 and 2022 — a dismissal rate of 92.5 percent. Of the 29 cases that actually resulted in a conviction, only two defendants received any active prison time. The rest walked away with probation or time already served. Local law enforcement officials went on record saying they had lost confidence in the Attorney General's office because of how routinely it failed to pursue these cases.

Oregon. Oregon has mandatory minimum sentences on the books for serious sex crimes under a law known as Measure 11, but those minimums only apply when prosecutors charge the case in a way that triggers them — and they frequently don't. Scott Johnson, 27, pleaded guilty to three counts of encouraging child sexual abuse after investigators found graphic material depicting the torture and abuse of young girls on his devices. He was sentenced to probation and weekend jail time, which the court allowed him to serve "at his convenience."

Washington. In 2019, a statewide operation called "Net Nanny" caught a group of men attempting to solicit sex from minors online. The sentences that followed varied wildly depending on which county and which judge handled the case. Richie Robertson, a 24-year-old from Yakima charged with attempted second-degree child rape, ultimately pleaded down to a lesser charge — communication with a minor for immoral purposes — and was released after serving 185 days, with a 10-year registration requirement. Other defendants caught in the same operation received sentences of five to six years in prison. Same investigation, same conduct, wildly different outcomes depending on the luck of the courtroom draw.

New York. In 2019, Christopher Belter pleaded guilty to raping and sexually abusing multiple teenage girls. Niagara County Judge Sara Sheldon sentenced him to probation with no prison time, telling the court she had "prayed" about the decision and concluded that prison "isn't appropriate" for him. One victim's attorney did not mince words afterward: "He is privileged, he comes from money, he is white. For an adult to get away with these crimes is unjust." In a separate case the same year, a Jefferson County judge sentenced a man who pleaded guilty to raping a 14-year-old to 10 years of probation and no jail time at all, sparking enough public anger that the judge's office began fielding what court officials described as a flood of furious phone calls.

California. In 2015, Orange County Superior Court Judge M. Marc Kelly sentenced Kevin Rojano-Nieto to 10 years in prison for sodomizing his three-year-old relative — well below the state-mandated minimum of 25 years to life. Kelly wrote that imposing the full mandatory sentence would be unconstitutionally cruel, and he described the assault as not comparable to "a situation where a pedophilic child predator preys on an innocent child." He also noted, in his written ruling, that the toddler "appears to be a happy, healthy child." The backlash was immediate and enormous: a recall petition against Kelly gathered more than 83,000 signatures, and Orange County's own District Attorney called the sentence illegal and appealed it. Three years later, an appeals court agreed, threw out the 10-year sentence, and ordered Kelly to resentence Rojano-Nieto to the full 25 years to life. It is one of the only cases in this entire pattern where a light sentence was actually corrected — and it only happened because a prosecutor was willing to fight it all the way through the appellate courts.

Michigan. Jamie Treadwell, an art teacher at a private Christian school in Grand Rapids, was accused by two separate families of sexually assaulting their children. He was originally charged with two felony counts of criminal sexual conduct against children under 13. A plea deal dropped one charge entirely and reduced the other to attempted criminal sexual conduct. Treadwell pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 14 days in jail — time he had already served — plus 18 months of probation. He does have to register as a sex offender, which puts this case a step above several others in this article, but the underlying conduct earned him barely two weeks behind bars.

Look closely at every one of these cases, and the pattern is not about geography, and it is not about ideology in the sense of any one political party or any one judge's worldview. It is structural. Every state gives prosecutors enormous discretion over how a case gets charged in the first place, and every state gives judges enormous discretion over how a sentence gets handed down once a plea is entered. When a defendant has a good lawyer, a cooperative prosecutor, or a judge inclined toward leniency, that discretion routinely produces outcomes that make a mockery of the underlying crime.

A stay of adjudication in Minnesota. A 92.5 percent dismissal rate in South Carolina. A judge in Oregon letting a man serve weekend jail time "at his convenience." A charge quietly downgraded in Washington. A judge in New York who "prayed" his way to probation. A California judge overriding a 25-year mandatory minimum because he decided a raped toddler still seemed like "a happy, healthy child." A Michigan teacher who spent two weeks in jail for assaulting students in his own classroom.

Every one of these cases had a victim who will carry what happened to them for the rest of their life. Every one of these offenders will, in most cases, be free to walk their own neighborhood streets in less time than it takes to finish a single school year.

State sentencing guidelines were never designed with any single family in mind. They were designed as a system, and in state after state, that system has been captured by the discretion of individual prosecutors and individual judges who decide, case by case, that a child rapist does not deserve the sentence the law was written to require. When accountability depends entirely on which county a crime happens to occur in, or which judge happens to be sitting on the bench that day, it stops being justice and starts being a lottery — and the losers in that lottery are children.

The fix is not complicated, even if passing it will be a fight. Congress needs to establish a federal mandatory minimum sentence for first-degree criminal sexual conduct against a child, applicable in every state, with no stay of adjudication, no stay of imposition, and no plea-bargain pathway that allows a conviction to simply vanish once probation ends. If a state wants to exceed the federal floor, it should be free to do so. No state should be allowed to fall below it.

Mandatory minimums are not a perfect tool, and reasonable people can debate their use across the wide range of crimes on the books. But the crime at the center of every case in this article is not ambiguous. It is not a case where reasonable people disagree about whether the conduct was wrong. Raping a child is not a judgment call. It should not be treated as one by 50 different sets of state guidelines, interpreted by thousands of different judges, each free to decide on their own that this particular child, in this particular courtroom, on this particular day, simply doesn't warrant the sentence the crime deserves.

Mohamed Bakari Shei will be free, off probation eventually, off any registry immediately, with no permanent record of what he did to two little girls in Rochester, Minnesota. Kevin Rojano-Nieto is the rare case that got corrected — but only because a district attorney fought for three years to undo a single judge's decision. Tou Lue Vang served zero days in prison for a 12-year sentence and was, decades later, formally pardoned by the state that convicted him. These are not the exceptions. They are the pattern.

A country that cannot guarantee a minimum, consistent, meaningful consequence for the rape of a child is a country that has decided, functionally, that this crime is negotiable. It is time to make it non-negotiable everywhere, for everyone, regardless of which state a child happens to be born in.