IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF ARIZONA

IN AND FOR THE COUNTY OF YAVAPAI

STATE OF ARIZONA, )
)
Plaintiff, )
) Case No.
vs. ) P1300CR201600966
)
THOMAS JONATHAN CHANTRY, )
)
Defendant. )
)

Camp Verde, Arizona

July 19, 2019
8:51 a.m.

BEFORE: The Honorable BRADLEY H. ASTROWSKY, Judge

Prepared For:
Cheryl Watson

Laura A. Ashbrook
Certified Reporter
Certificate No. 50360
 2

1 APPEARANCES:
2
3
On behalf of the Plaintiff:
4
YAVAPAI COUNTY ATTORNEY'S OFFICE
5 By: Susan Eazer, Assistant County Attorney
255 East Gurley Street
6 Prescott, Arizona 86301
7
On behalf of the Defendant:
8
GRIFFIN & STEVENS LAW FIRM, PLLC
9 By: Ryan J. Stevens
609 North Humphreys Street
10 Flagstaff, Arizona 86001
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25

Yavapai County
Superior Court
 3

1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2
3 THE COURT: Moving forward with the
4 sentencing. On May 8, 2019 as a result of a jury verdict,
5 the defendant was determined to be guilty of the following
6 -- and please note when I give the count names, I'm going
7 to be giving the count names that are in the actual
8 indictment. We used an amended indictment for purposes of
9 the second trial, but labeled things 1 through 4, when
10 actually these counts were Counts 2 through 5, if that
11 helps the clerk.
12 The defendant was determined to be guilty of
13 the following: Count 2, molestation of a child, a Class 2
14 felony, dangerous crime against children, committed on or
15 between September 1st, 1995 and January 31st, 1996;
16 Count 3, molestation of a child, a Class 2
17 dangerous crime against children, committed in violation
18 of Arizona Law on or between the same dates;
19 Count 4, molestation of a child, a Class 2
20 felony and dangerous crime against children, committed in
21 violation of Arizona Law on or about the same dates, and
22 Count 5, molestation of a child, a Class 2
23 felony and dangerous crime against children, in violation
24 of Arizona Law on or about the same dates.
25 As a result of the jury verdict, it is

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 4

1 determined the defendant is guilty of those offenses.

2 The jury also found the existence of one
3 aggravating factor, specifically, that the offenses caused
4 emotional harm to the victim. Therefore, as a result, the
5 Court can consider any additional aggravating
6 circumstances.
7 In addition, by way of calculation on the
8 information presented in the presentence report, the
9 defendant is determined to have 404 days of presentence
10 incarceration credit.
11 Do you agree, Mr. Stevens?
12 MR. STEVENS: Yes, Your Honor.
13 THE COURT: Does the state agree with that
14 number?
15 MS. EAZER: Yes, Your Honor.
16 THE COURT: All right. Thank you. So
17 that's what I'll find.
18 Prior to coming to court, the Court reviewed
19 the following and considered the following information:
20 the evidence presented at trial, the presentence report,
21 the state's sentencing memorandum. And when I indicate
22 the memorandum, whether it's from the state or the
23 defense, I also reviewed all the attachments to same. The
24 state's notice of filing additional sentencing documents,
25 the defendant's pre-sentencing memorandum, the supplement

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 5

1 to defendant's pre-sentencing memorandum, a retraction of

2 a letter from Tom Morrison, as well as two additional
3 letters that I received this morning that are written on
4 behalf of defendant.
5 Now, these weren't filed; they were attached
6 to a filing, Mr. Stevens, so my plan is to give these to
7 the clerk. Is that okay?
8 MR. STEVENS: Yes. Thank you, Your Honor.
9 THE COURT: That's everything that I
10 reviewed and received prior to today. From the state's
11 perspective, do you believe I missed any information that
12 you filed?
13 MS. EAZER: No, Your Honor.
14 THE COURT: Defense perspective?
15 MR. STEVENS: No, Your Honor.
16 THE COURT: All right. Thank you. So
17 first, as it applies to the sentencing and the structure
18 that we're here to address, let me just make a record
19 concerning that and have the parties address this topic,
20 if you believe you need to.
21 At the time that these offenses were
22 committed, the sentencing structure for dangerous crimes
23 against children, which this is, which includes
24 molestation of a child under the age of 15, ARS 13-604.01
25 was in place. That statute has since been renumbered, but

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 6

1 at the time, it was ARS 13-604.01.

2 ARS 13-604.01(d) set the sentencing range
3 for molestation of a child which has a presumptive term of
4 17 years, a minimum or mitigated term of ten years and an
5 aggravated term of 24 years. The sentence imposed for
6 molestation of a child has to be served in full. We
7 sometimes refer to it as a flat-year or calendar-year
8 sentence. It means the defendant is not eligible for any
9 type of early release or parole of any kind until he has
10 served every day of the sentence imposed.
11 604.01(k), however, makes a distinction
12 between molestation of a child and also sexual abuse under
13 subsection (e), I believe it is, under 13-604.01. That
14 makes it different than perhaps other Title 13 offenses,
15 meaning typically and generally, any sentence imposed, any
16 time for any dangerous crime against children in the first
17 degree, of which this is, must be served consecutive to
18 any other sentence imposed any time for any other offense
19 except for molestation of a child involving a single
20 victim.
21 Therefore, the Court has the discretion
22 under the law to run the sentences imposed for Counts 2
23 through 5 either concurrently or consecutively at the
24 Court's discretion. The range, however, for each count
25 will be ten to 24 years, with 17 as the presumptive term

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 7

1 and it must be a flat-time sentence.

2 As far as the sentencing range goes and the
3 law that applied at that time concerning these offenses,
4 do you disagree or have any comments concerning that, from
5 the state's perspective?
6 MS. EAZER: Judge, other than what I already
7 indicated in chambers, the state agrees that the law back
8 in 1995 did allow for concurrent sentences with the same
9 victim. While, as I stated, I think that it was not the
10 intent of the legislature and that subsequently was
11 corrected and the state would certainly be arguing the
12 spirit of what has been done since would seem to suggest
13 that all dangerous crimes against children must run
14 consecutive -- convictions must run consecutive, I do not
15 disagree with the Court that the law at the time and
16 specifically under State v. Supinger allowed the Court in
17 its discretion to impose consecutive -- concurrent
18 sentences.
19 THE COURT: Thank you. Certainly that's
20 without prejudice to the state arguing for consecutive or
21 something else.
22 Mr. Stevens.
23 MR. STEVENS: Your Honor, I agree with the
24 Court's assessment of the lawyer.
25 THE COURT: All right. Thank you. So next

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 8

1 what we'll do is, procedurally, so everyone knows how

2 we're going to go forward this morning, first I'm going to
3 hear from anyone who wants to make statements from the
4 victim's perspective, from the state's side. When that's
5 done, I will hear from anyone who wants to make statements
6 on behalf of the defendant. When that is done, I'll hear
7 argument from the state. When that's done, I'll hear from
8 Mr. Chantry himself, if he chooses to make statements to
9 the Court. It's up to him if he chooses to do so. Then
10 I'll hear arguments from defense counsel and then I'll
11 pronounce the sentence.
12 Now, we have a lot of people here. This is
13 an emotional case. It's emotional for a lot of people,
14 for a lot of different reasons, and I understand that.
15 What I would ask people to do is when people are up here
16 addressing the Court, your statements, understand, are for
17 me, so you're talking to me.
18 A lot of times in sentencings, people want
19 to make -- turn around and look at people or face the
20 defendant. This is, unfortunately, not the time for that.
21 This is the time for you to talk to me about what you want
22 to make sure that I know before I pronounce the sentence.
23 In addition, there may be things that some
24 people say, whether it's the lawyers or people that come
25 up here, that some of you may not agree with. That's

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 9

1 okay. You don't have to agree with everything someone

2 else says. What I would ask you to do is please be
3 respectful and no audible responses to what people are
4 saying. If you get a -- react emotionally, that's okay.
5 You're human beings; you can react emotionally, but I
6 don't want anyone who's up here getting less than the full
7 respect of the Court and everyone in here.
8 If that happens, then I may have to do
9 something, ask you to leave, and I don't want to have to
10 do that because I want to make sure everyone gets to hear
11 everything.
12 All right. So with that being said, Miss
13 Eazer, is there anyone that would like to address the
14 Court from your perspective?
15 MS. EAZER: Yes, Your Honor. I believe
16 first L J is going to come up.
17 THE COURT: All right. Thank you. When you
18 come up to the podium, if you could please state your name
19 and spell your last name for the record first and then
20 take your time and you tell me whatever it is you want me
21 to know, okay, ma'am?
22 MS. J : L J , J .
23 THE COURT: Thank you.
24 MS. J : I was fine until I walked in
25 that door. All the emotion of all these years just came

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 10

1 back up. Your Honor, this man has stole so much from my
2 family. He stole the trust that my children had in us as
3 parents. He stole the trust that W and J and
4 D had in their parents, and I think as parents, Tom
5 also stole from us the trust that we had in those that
6 were over us, Bob Selph, Ted Tripp and others who were
7 investigating on our behalf.
8 And I found out since the first trial many
9 things I did not know. I did not know all the things that
10 had happened to M at 10 and the burden that he had to
11 carry because he couldn't tell us, as parents, what
12 happened. And I look at M . I think what a strong
13 little boy that was to have that burden that he had to
14 carry by himself, and it rips my heart out that we weren't
15 able to know -- I'm sorry -- that we weren't able to help
16 him.
17 Your Honor, I just ask that you give Tom
18 Chantry as maximum sentences as you can, because I don't
19 know if M was the first one that Tom molested, but I'm
20 sure D L was not the last and, Lord, I just -- or
21 judge, I just pray and ask that you would just keep that
22 in mind, all the things that he stole, all the joy that he
23 stole from my family and the other families involved and
24 that you would just give him the maximum, please. Thank
25 you.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 11

1 THE COURT: Thank you, ma'am.

2 Who's next, Miss Eazer? All right. Good
3 morning, ma'am. State your name and spell your last name
4 for the record, please.
5 MS. T J : T J , J .
6 I'm married to M J . I've been in the J
7 family since 2004. I knew right away that something bad
8 had happened right when I joined the family. I love my
9 husband so much and he is such a strong man. There is
10 very little in life that he can't handle. One of his
11 favorite savings is it's a piece of cake. No matter what
12 we tackle in life, he goes after it.
13 But when I hear him talk about that day that
14 he saw through the window of the door his brother, he
15 crumbles to pieces. That is so hard to see him fall
16 apart, and I sorrow for what has happened with his
17 relationship with his only brother because he wants that
18 to be strong so badly.
19 He sees my family and he struggles and has
20 sorrow that he can't have that relationship with his
21 brother. And we have hope that that will improve in
22 future days, but we can't get the past back, and that is
23 the reason that I am asking you to impose as much of a
24 sentence as you can, because we can't get those days back.
25 It can't be undone.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 12

1 We trust your decision, and we will honor it

2 and we will respect you, but we're asking you to give him
3 as much as you can, because we do not believe that he has
4 been repentant in any way.
5 I believe that the grace of God changes
6 people in amazing ways and I know that he did that in my
7 life, and I have seen it done in others, and so I do
8 believe people change, but repentant people change and
9 he's not repentant; therefore, I believe that he has not
10 changed.
11 I believe him to be a continued threat to
12 society, and I don't want any other family to go through
13 what we have because it has been so difficult.
14 Thank you for your time. I appreciate all
15 your work on this case.
16 THE COURT: Thank you, ma'am. Give me one
17 moment. Thank you, sir. If you could state and spell
18 your last name for the record, please.
19 MR. J : My name is L J ,
20 J .
21 THE COURT: Thank you. Go ahead, sir.
22 MR. J : It's my understanding you've
23 read my letter that I sent you.
24 THE COURT: Yes, sir.
25 MR. J : So I won't reiterate that. I'm

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 13

1 just here to basically speak for my son. M has

2 testified before your Court, I believe it was your Court
3 all three times, but anyway, he's testified three times,
4 and I don't think he can bring himself to actually write a
5 letter this time. Bringing back the memories of all this
6 just tears him up and so I'll speak for him as best I can,
7 but in speaking for him, I'm just going to ask that
8 M 's -- M has asked that -- that Tom never have the
9 opportunity to do to another child what he did to him, and
10 that's what I'm asking of you.
11 This whole thing has been just surreal and
12 it's been devastating to our families and, you know, it's
13 come down to -- in the trial, it seemed to come down to
14 either we're making all this up or Tom's lying. And the
15 jury has made their decision on that, and I'm thankful for
16 that, and I just ask you to honor M 's wishes that Tom
17 Chantry never be allowed to have the opportunity to do
18 what he did to M to any other child again. Thank you.
19 THE COURT: Thank you, sir.
20 Anyone else, Miss Eazer?
21 MS. EAZER: I don't believe so, judge. So
22 that's everyone.
23 MS. EAZER: Judge, and I should say I
24 limited it to family members. Is that the Court's
25 preference? Because I don't know if others that are here

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 14

1 that may have had something to do with the case would like
2 to speak but --
3 THE COURT: Well, who would like to speak?
4 MS. EAZER: I don't know. I didn't ask. I
5 specifically said only family members. I didn't know if
6 that's this Court's preference, so I didn't want to
7 presume.
8 THE COURT: See who makes a request and we
9 can talk about it.
10 MS. EAZER: Is there anybody else?
11 THE COURT: Who is that?
12 MS. EAZER: Robert Selph.
13 THE COURT: All right. Thank you. I'll let
14 him speak. All right. Thank you, sir. When you get to
15 the podium, tell us your name and spell your last name for
16 the record, please.
17 MR. SELPH: My name is Robert Selph. Last
18 name S-E-L-P-H.
19 THE COURT: All right. Thank you, sir. Go
20 ahead.
21 MR. SELPH: I was -- I've known L and
22 L J and the kids for about 40 years, and the thing
23 I'd like to say is that I implicitly trust their honesty
24 and their integrity and believe that the testimony that
25 they have given over those years with regard to their son

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 15

1 and their experience, I believe that, and I would

2 encourage the Court to take -- to believe that.
3 I understand that the accused was found
4 guilty by the jury, so when you think about sentencing, I
5 just encourage, implore really, the Court to truly embrace
6 their testimony. And when they talk about devastating
7 hurt to their family and all the things they've suffered,
8 I believe them, and I would encourage the Court to believe
9 them too.
10 So we include -- all of us from both sides
11 have been in Christian churches and believe in the bible,
12 and there is a principle about justice that we believe and
13 whatever that justice is in this case, and we do trust the
14 Court to understand that, identify that, to let that be.
15 And God has, according to the bible, made you a minister
16 of God to see that justice is served and the people are
17 protected.
18 So I just to encourage you, Your Honor, to
19 understand that and to apply all that you can so that
20 justice can be served and the people will be protected.
21 Thank you.
22 THE COURT: Thank you, sir. Anyone else,
23 Miss Eazer?
24 MS. EAZER: I don't believe so, judge.
25 THE COURT: All right. Thank you very much.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 16

1 Mr. Stevens, who would like to address the

2 Court on behalf of your client?
3 MR. STEVENS: Your Honor, first Alan Huber.
4 THE COURT: All right. Thank you. Please
5 come to the podium and then state your full name and spell
6 your last name for the record, please.
7 MR. HUBER: Alan Huber. My last name is
8 H-U-B-E-R.
9 THE COURT: Thank you, sir. Go ahead,
10 please.
11 MR. HUBER: Well, thank you for the
12 opportunity to address you, Your Honor. To augment the
13 letter that I wrote to you last month, I have a few things
14 I'd like to say, and as I say them, I want you to know
15 that I'm speaking on behalf of my wife, all of my grown
16 children -- there's five of them -- and, of course, my
17 grandchildren that are of age as well; that I'm speaking
18 on all of our behalf.
19 Just to give you a little bit of my
20 background, I've been a supervisor and manager in
21 manufacturing for over 40 years now. So I've had hiring
22 and firing and working with many different people over
23 many years, and I don't judge myself as being a perfect
24 judge of character, and I've been conned by some pretty --
25 pretty good con men over the years as I've been in

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 17

1 business, but they've never conned me for very long, a few

2 months, a year, a couple years at the most, and my -- and
3 as I said in my letter, I want you to understand that I'm
4 not -- I'm not trying to argue for Tom's innocence in this
5 case.
6 All I can testify to is what I know of since
7 I've known Tom for the last 16 years or so, and so what I
8 have known and experienced and what we as a family have
9 experienced is that we have not experienced, in all this
10 time, any inappropriate behavior from Tom amongst us or
11 any of our acquaintances, as far as observing any
12 inappropriate behavior with Tom with children or with
13 anyone else.
14 What we have seen and heard from ourselves
15 and others in our acquaintance has been that Tom has been
16 a good influence and he's done many good things and he's
17 helped many -- he's worked at the Milwaukee rescue
18 mission, helping the men in their program to overcome the
19 negative things in their lives. He's done all this as a
20 volunteer without pay.
21 He's met with families in crisis. This is
22 often after hours, taking time from his own family, Your
23 Honor, to minister to others. He's visited the sick and
24 the dying and he's ministered to them in their time of
25 need. He's given to the poor.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 18

1 He has, with the help of my daughter,

2 instilled very good qualities in his three boys. They're
3 respectful to adults. They're good students. I have much
4 interaction with the family. We are a close family. I've
5 had much interaction with the family, and I see the
6 interaction between Tom and his children as being very
7 healthy and very good. I've seen them tease him and he
8 teases them back. They're obviously not in any way
9 intimidated by him at all. They love their father and
10 they've been devastated by all of this as well, and they
11 want him back.
12 And so my argument before you, Your Honor,
13 along with the things I mentioned in my letter, is that
14 Tom is not -- since he's left Arizona, he's not
15 demonstrated the same kind of things that I've heard of in
16 this courtroom. As you know, I sat through the first
17 trial and I've heard all of these things, and it seems a
18 whole different Tom Chantry than what I've experienced for
19 16 plus years, what our whole family and all of us have
20 experienced.
21 So there's been a lot said about people
22 don't want anything to happen in the future, and that's a
23 very legitimate argument. Who wants anything to happen to
24 children in the future? And if I thought, Your Honor,
25 that Tom was any danger to children in the future, I would

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 19

1 not stand up here and plead on his behalf. I wouldn't do

2 that for anything.
3 And so I honestly believe whatever he did in
4 the past, something has changed. He's not the same man
5 through what we've seen in our experience, and so I do
6 believe people change, and Tom is not that man anymore and
7 we've all seen it, and also, to know too, Your Honor, that
8 inquiry has been made amongst the churches in Illinois and
9 Wisconsin encouraging parents to talk to their children,
10 many of which are grown now asking them has Tom done
11 anything inappropriate to you or anything, just to make
12 sure there's -- he hasn't continued this behavior, and all
13 the feedback that's been gotten has been positive -- I
14 mean negative; that he hasn't -- hasn't done those things,
15 but just the opposite: He's been a blessing to them.
16 We have grown children that have been
17 telling their parents and pastors that, no, Tom is a real
18 help to me; he was an influence to me for the good and
19 they speak well of him.
20 So I just wanted you to know these things,
21 and then just to say in closing, Your Honor, that because
22 of these things, I believe Tom is not the typical sex
23 offender that you might sentence in a case like this, and
24 I -- I don't believe that this -- that you need to give
25 him the maximum. I plead with you on behalf especially of

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 20

1 the three boys, if I could go home and be able to tell

2 them that in their lifetime, they'll get to sit down at
3 the same table with their father again some day, even
4 though it will be after they're grown up, I believe it
5 would give these boys a little bit of hope. Right now,
6 hope has been stripped from them. They're suffering
7 emotionally because of this themselves, and I know it
8 would minister to their souls if I could tell them that.
9 So I ask you to give him as minimal a sentence as you can.
10 Thank you.
11 THE COURT: Thank you, sir.
12 MR. STEVENS: Karen Chantry, please.
13 THE COURT: All right. Thank you. Good
14 morning, ma'am. Please state and spell your last name for
15 the record.
16 MS. CHANTRY: Karen Chantry, C-H-A-N-T-R-Y.
17 THE COURT: Thank you. Go ahead.
18 MS. CHANTRY: Thank you for letting me come
19 up and talk today. I do understand that Tom was found
20 guilty in this courtroom, so I am not going to argue for
21 his innocence or anything like that. I do want to say
22 that I am the only person here who has lived with him and
23 who's spent time with him and has seen him intimately
24 interact with his family.
25 I've been married to him for nearly 15 years

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 21

1 and I've known him for about 17 I think. In that time,

2 Tom has never once disrespected me, never even once.
3 We've had arguments and we've had disagreements, but I've
4 never felt threatened by him and I have never felt like
5 he's bullying me, and I have always felt taken care of.
6 There are times that he will give in to me
7 in a disagreement even when he's not -- thinks that I am
8 not making the right decision because he thinks it's not
9 perhaps that important and having peace in our marriage is
10 more important. He's a very kind and loving husband to
11 me. He's kind and loving to my children. He -- all my
12 children love him so much.
13 My oldest, today he texted me right before
14 this, and just was expressions of love and concern, and he
15 wants me to call him right after this to let him know how
16 it goes. He wants to know if he'll ever see his dad
17 again. We're thankful for technology that we can video
18 chat with him. It's not the same as sitting at a table
19 and eating with him or going for a walk.
20 They respect their dad. They have learned
21 so much from him. I'm proud of the men that they are
22 going to be. I can see it in seed form right now in them.
23 That's because of a lot of Tom's teaching and fathering.
24 He's always been kind. I've never been afraid of my -- of
25 Tom towards my children. Never once have I been afraid

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 22

1 for my children.
2 I wanted to make that statement because of
3 statements that have been said about my family, and I want
4 you to know that that has not been my experience living
5 with this man.
6 We miss him and we do want him back. And so
7 I do ask you, Your Honor, if you would, to please allow
8 him to serve his term and allow him to come home and be
9 with us and see his children and grandchildren again.
10 Thank you.
11 THE COURT: Thank you. Anyone else, sir?
12 MR. STEVENS: No. Thank you, Your Honor.
13 THE COURT: All right. Thank you.
14 All right. At this time, Miss Eazer.
15 MS. EAZER: Thank you, Your Honor. I want
16 to first just briefly address some of what the Court has
17 heard this morning.
18 In preparing a sentencing memorandum, I went
19 back and forth about what to provide to the Court and what
20 not to provide because I did not in any way want to make
21 it appear that it was a character assassination on Tom
22 Chantry. I provided some of the jail calls not to, again,
23 attack his character but to show this Court I think what
24 is a very large element of this man's personality.
25 I will tell the Court that Miss Chantry

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 23

1 previously and has told this Court today she implicitly

2 trusts her husband and he's a good man and that his
3 children don't fear him and that she's never seen him harm
4 his children. But she testified in front of another court
5 and said while he was out on release, she's allowed him to
6 continue to punish, spank the children when she's not
7 present in the room. I know that that was -- I've heard
8 that was something that was quite shocking to Judge
9 Trebesch; that a man out on release pending these type of
10 charges, that the mother would allow him to be alone with
11 the children and to punish them.
12 I'm not standing here telling this Court
13 what Miss Chantry or Mr. Huber has said is not true. You
14 know, I think this Court sees it; we all see it and
15 probably if we ask ourselves, we all have done it or would
16 do it. When we love someone, we don't want to see the bad
17 side of them. We don't want to believe they could do
18 something bad. And I appreciated Mr. Huber's comments
19 that he's not trying to convince this Court of his
20 son-in-law's innocence, because he did sit through this
21 trial, and I appreciate that his comments were, in the
22 time he's known him, he has seen him do honorable things.
23 But the one thing I think -- and I don't
24 think I need to say this to this Court because I know this
25 Court is very wise and knows this very well from all of

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 24

1 its experience, but to say that someone is not going to be

2 a danger because they have been a good person in the last
3 16 years in the eyes of their family has two -- two flaws
4 with it. Number one. Again, families are blinded usually
5 by love to their loved one's faults. We all are.
6 Number two. They sat through this trial,
7 and I don't think anybody questioned whether or not that
8 man was telling the truth when he testified, denying
9 everything, everything, even hitting some of the children,
10 even spanking some of the children, let alone pulling down
11 their pants. He denied one thing after another, and I
12 would think that that should give pause to anybody
13 listening to his testimony.
14 And I know this Court can't consider lack of
15 acceptance of responsibility or lack of remorse in
16 sentencing the defendant today, but I would submit that
17 the defendant's testimony during the first trial does show
18 he's a very prolific liar, and that makes him a very
19 dangerous man, even if his loved ones believe he has
20 reformed in the last 16 years.
21 I want to speak now about M , and I --
22 when I began this case in early 2016 and one by one, the
23 various victims came in to meet with myself and the victim
24 advocate, I was struck by how these grown adults, very
25 successful adults, each of them came in and within

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 25

1 moments, just crumbled before my eyes.

2 Each and every one of them, M included,
3 came in strong. They all had good jobs; they're all
4 educated; they have loving families, and they crumbled
5 when they spoke about what had happened to them at the
6 hands of Tom Chantry.
7 M is an incredible young man. As this
8 Court heard, he's incredibly, incredibly talented,
9 incredibly smart. He's very sensitive, very shy, very
10 quiet. M , when he came into the office, and I met with
11 him many times over the last three years, it was very
12 clear he didn't want to speak about this and that every
13 time he had to speak about it, it ripped him apart,
14 literally ripped him apart.
15 He came to court when needed and he agreed
16 to testify. The second trial, he was hopeful that maybe
17 D Chantry's trial -- I'm sorry -- D L 's
18 charges would take care of the matter because he didn't
19 want to come back and testify again because of what
20 happens to him every time he thinks about what this
21 defendant has done to him. And M has -- I spoke to him
22 at length after the verdict and I also spoke to him about
23 whether he wanted to come into court and speak to the
24 Court or write a letter, and M said, you know, I've
25 recognized that over the years when I allow myself to

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 26

1 think about what happened with Tom Chantry, it unravels

2 everything good in my life, literally.
3 And you saw that in the letters from his
4 family. M says I try and just be strong and come into
5 court, testify and set it aside, but it unravels me and it
6 did, as this Court saw, over the years when he would reach
7 out, still asking Tom Chantry for answers, still asking
8 how can I know that you aren't going to do this to other
9 children.
10 And as the Court will recall, that was the
11 question he was trying to have answered before this got
12 reported to the police. That's still the question he asks
13 today. I asked M do you want to write a letter? He
14 said, Susan, I can't even sit and write a letter because I
15 know it's going to set me over the edge again. I need
16 this to be done.
17 And what L J told you today is
18 exactly what he told me. I said, M , can I give the
19 Court a sentencing recommendation on your behalf? And he
20 grew very quiet and his statement was very short. He said
21 please ask the Court to sentence him to a long enough term
22 to assure that he will never do this to another child
23 again, and the state would echo M 's request, Your
24 Honor.
25 I recognize that there have not been any

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 27

1 more victims in the last 23 years that have at least

2 reported, but I would again implore this Court to remember
3 how long it took the victims from 1995 to 2000 to come
4 forward, and this Court, I know, is well aware of why
5 victims sometimes will never come forward in cases like
6 this, especially when the person that commits the abuse is
7 a person in the role such as the defendant acting as a
8 pastor.
9 Pedophilia does not go away, but Tom Chantry
10 has evidenced that he's -- he's given this Court even more
11 reason to have significant concern, and I included this in
12 my sentencing memorandum. After being confronted about
13 M , he didn't stop. After being confronted by T
14 W , he didn't stop. After bruising, severely injuring
15 D L , he didn't stop. After signing an agreement
16 that he would never spank another child again, he didn't
17 stop.
18 The four sessions he went to with the
19 counselor, that was all he had to do within a two-week
20 period of time. The last paragraph of that report was Tom
21 agrees he should never be alone with another child other
22 than his own, and he will never put himself in a situation
23 where he's alone with another child and he will never
24 spank another child.
25 One year later he's working in a school with

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 28

1 children of the same age, and you gotta kinda wonder why
2 he was paddling a five-year-old and why he paddled a
3 five-year-old hard enough that the marks were still
4 present the next day.
5 That's the acts of a narcissist sociopath
6 but most of all, a pedophile. Can't stop. Didn't stop.
7 Any other wise person would have stopped after the first
8 time if this was not a problem. Tom Chantry didn't stop,
9 and I don't believe Tom Chantry will ever stop.
10 And he's very good at fooling people. He's
11 very, very intelligent. He's very well spoken, and he's
12 very good at fooling people, but he didn't fool the 12
13 people on that jury, and I know he didn't fool Your Honor.
14 And I would just again echo M 's
15 recommendation to this Court and more -- not
16 recommendation, a request, his prayer that this Court make
17 sure that Tom Chantry never has an opportunity to be alone
18 with a child again. Thank you, Your Honor.
19 THE COURT: Thank you.
20 Mr. Stevens, if you and your client could
21 please approach the podium. Thank you. Does your client
22 wish to address the Court?
23 MR. STEVENS: Yes, Your Honor, he does.
24 THE COURT: Go ahead, please.
25 THE DEFENDANT: Thank you, Your Honor, for

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 29

1 allowing me to speak. I recognize that my remarks are

2 going to be anything but typical and I appreciate this
3 opportunity. Your Honor, I must continue today, as I have
4 for nearly two decades now, to maintain my innocence. I
5 have not committed these crimes and that is a fact. It is
6 a truth which must be stated.
7 Last summer during my first trial, our case
8 agent, Mr. Robertson remarked that it must be difficult to
9 sit with my life on the line and to be the only person who
10 knows the whole truth about every allegation. It is an
11 awful experience, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but
12 the fact is that I do know the truth, and truth sometimes
13 needs to be spoken, if only for its own sake.
14 Now, I don't mean that to be arrogant, sir.
15 There's much that I do not know. I do not know the
16 intricacies of the law. After the last three years, I
17 sometimes feel like I am an expert in the law, but I've
18 spent a year of that in jail, and I listen to the things
19 that inmates say, and it makes me very aware that we are
20 not lawyers. There is a lot that we don't know.
21 And so if my remarks today are crossing some
22 line, I just ask you to please be patient. I am trying as
23 best as I understand to comply with the rules and customs
24 of the Court.
25 Your Honor, about a year ago, prior to the

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 30

1 first trial, I decided that I must put aside all thought

2 of strategy and tactics and that I must approach this long
3 legal proceeding as a crusade for truth. That is the real
4 reason why I testified last summer, and that's why I find
5 that I must speak again today.
6 Since the first allegations against me in
7 2000, I have waited for someone to -- to investigate facts
8 and, Your Honor, I'm still waiting. Miller Valley Church
9 certainly did not investigate. Testimony of church
10 officers and members has now revealed that the third-hand
11 story of my interaction with D L , the story of
12 his cousin, H E , was taken by the elders to
13 the other parents, and at least it was taken by the
14 W to their children.
15 The cross-pollination that the state was
16 trying so hard to prove never happened during the police
17 investigation actually happened 19 years ago. It was
18 caused by the church because the church was not attempting
19 to discover the truth.
20 The church council never concerned itself
21 with the facts. Those men have been called an
22 investigative team, but they were not. I can't tell you
23 anything about their meetings with the other families
24 because they never told me anything about them. They
25 never even mentioned J or W W in their

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 31

1 meetings with me. They interrogated me in a haphazard, in

2 aggressive fashion and they told me that they had no
3 evidence that I was lying, and then they issued various
4 contradictory reports, some of which I first heard about
5 last summer.
6 Worst of all, when I attempted to tell my
7 story, they would not let me speak. They did nothing to
8 discover the truth. Former Detective Belling, who was
9 then Detective Bernard, of the Prescott Police Department
10 has not yet encountered any of the facts in this case.
11 In the 12 months that she had the case prior
12 to the indictment, she averaged less than one phone call
13 per month. She never went to the church. She never met
14 any victim. She questioned nothing. She had no curiosity
15 about the truth. She allowed the J E fiasco to
16 continue, even making false statements to the grand jury,
17 not out of malice, but out of mere incompetence and
18 ignorance.
19 You, Your Honor, appear not to believe that
20 allegation. Anyone else might have asked at that point
21 why would H E suggest to her son that he was
22 molested by someone he didn't remember? But not Detective
23 Bernard. She was an investigator who never investigated.
24 Deputy County Attorney Eazer has not for a
25 moment concerned herself with the facts, as I just noted.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 32

1 She is continuing to make up facts today about council

2 things that I signed which I have never seen. I have a
3 lot to say about her, but let's begin here: Miss Eazer
4 advanced what she knew to be a false narrative last
5 summer. Do you recall how she tried to argue that my
6 father ran the church council and interfered with it?
7 There was never a shred of evidence to that effect. This
8 year her own witnesses denied it, but she liked that
9 story. One of the bloggers who lurk around the edges of
10 this case suggested it to her, and because it made me look
11 bad, she ran with it. Your Honor, she knew all along that
12 it wasn't the truth.
13 Just before trial last summer, she
14 interviewed my predecessor, Pastor Bob Selph. Bob Selph
15 has finally arrived at this trial now that he cannot be
16 put on the stand. Pastor Selph told her that he ran the
17 council. In the fall of 2016, council documents have been
18 discovered missing from the archives. Pastor Selph told
19 her that he took them. He considered them his property
20 because he thought that the council wasn't an ARBCA affair
21 at all, just his friends that he sent to help his old
22 church. But the truth would not have helped the state.
23 If Pastor Selph, who is the most important
24 man in H E life, the man she called
25 immediately after she falsely identified me as her son's

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 33

1 abuser, if he were the man who ran and controlled the

2 council, that wouldn't help. So Miss Eazer joined the
3 bloggers in what she knew to be a false slander of my
4 father, a slander which has harmed him like she will never
5 know. She has not, she does not and she will not hear
6 about the truth.
7 So, yes, I am still waiting. No one has
8 investigated, and still I know the truth, and the truth
9 must be spoken, but I'm not only here to speak the truth,
10 Your Honor. I do have certain appeals to make to your
11 sense of justice.
12 The first is this: I ask you to dismiss, to
13 disregard and to reject the request that has been
14 communicated to you from M J today. I realize that
15 that is not a normal request, but in this case, sir, it is
16 justified. I ask it because Mr. J has proven beyond a
17 reasonable doubt that he is not a man of truth.
18 On the day that Mr. J testified this
19 spring, I personally counted 11 times that he admitted
20 that he had made false statements to police and even under
21 oath. Someone else may have counted more or less, but the
22 dominant feature of Mr. J 's testimony was his
23 acknowledgment of false statements, and these were not
24 trivial details. Mr. J made false statements in your
25 court to try to make his testimony more believable. He

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 34

1 even made false statements about critical elements of the

2 charges against me.
3 Mr. J stated under oath that no one ever
4 suggested molestation to him before he first disclosed his
5 story. Only it turns out that as he truthfully told
6 Detective Brazzell (phonetic), S first suggested it.
7 We know why he tried to hide this, an outside suggestion
8 makes his story less believable, especially if -- as he
9 himself thought and said more than once, especially if
10 that suggestion came from someone who thought that the old
11 story that he used to tell wasn't that big of a deal. His
12 deception then was intended to give credibility to his
13 story but he was caught and forced to admit the truth.
14 Mr. J also made false statements under
15 oath this spring about elements of the crime. He claimed,
16 contrary to prior sworn testimony, that I touched his anus
17 and he said, directly contradicting his first police
18 interview, that I masturbated him. He attempted to
19 dismiss the first of these as incidental contact probably
20 not knowing the implications this could have for appeal
21 based on the pending Steven May case.
22 Now, Miss Eazer, who apparently has never
23 quite figured out the difficulties that one would have in
24 holding an 11-year-old on one's lap, attempted with all
25 sorts of gyrations in front of the jury to show how there

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 35

1 could be incidental contact of this sort. But no matter

2 how much she twisted her arms and bent her logic, she
3 could not cover up what actually happened.
4 Having failed to win a conviction last
5 summer, Mr. J invented new allegations, and we even
6 know why he invented these allegations. He claimed under
7 oath that he has known the definition of molestation all
8 along, but it is clear in his 2016 testimony that he did
9 not understand it then. By the time that he had failed to
10 win a conviction last summer and the time he decided to
11 invent new allegations, he had learned the legal
12 definition and so he fit them into that definition. These
13 allegations are false. Mr. J already swore that they
14 did not happen.
15 Taken together -- and these are less than
16 half of his proven false statements. Taken together, we
17 have a clear picture of an embittered man willing to say
18 anything to win. I don't know why. I don't really need
19 to know why. We only need to know that he is unreliable,
20 and on that basis, Your Honor, I ask you to dismiss, to
21 disregard and to reject his requests.
22 I understand that Mr. J has a right to
23 be heard, but he does not have a right to be believed, nor
24 should you believe him. Some comment then is necessary on
25 how we reached this point.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 36

1 A jury has convicted me, in spite of what I

2 believe is obvious: that my accuser is not only unreliable
3 but is willing to say anything and tell any false story in
4 order to win.
5 Your Honor, in December of 2016, you found
6 on the sole basis of Mr. J 's testimony, proof evident
7 and presumption great that I had committed these crimes.
8 I ask you if he had on that day admitted nearly a dozen
9 false under-oath statements, could you have even found
10 that lower standard of proof? And is it then even
11 possible that the higher standard of reasonable doubt has
12 now been met? Since it has not, we have to ask how did
13 this happen.
14 In the immediate aftermath of the verdict, I
15 will admit that I was enraged. I blamed everyone. I said
16 things of which I am not proud and of which I would now
17 like to apologize. But I have had two months to calm down
18 and to reflect, and I believe that I can now speak to how
19 this happened.
20 It took only one day of the state's case to
21 demonstrate Mr. J 's falsehoods. The rest of its case
22 was taken up with a parade of witnesses with no knowledge
23 of the allegations. They came to talk about alleged
24 assaults, and the county attorney repeatedly bullied them
25 in her questions, eventually evoking emotional outbursts,

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 37

1 asking questions like why exactly does your son hate you?
2 And she succeeded in her aim which was never to prove
3 beyond a reasonable doubt that I molested Mr. J but to
4 produce a sympathetic reaction.
5 Eventually she asked the jury the rhetorical
6 question: How many of you are mothers and do you feel
7 these mothers' pain? She succeeded. She succeeded
8 because the jury abandoned its instructions. It could not
9 rationally have said that it had no reasonable doubt, but
10 after days of emotional battering, the jury's collective
11 thought moved beyond the burden of proof to the perceived
12 need to do something. This is the only explanation of
13 what happened that is acceptable.
14 Am I supposed to believe that a jury of my
15 peers was incapable of understanding that when a man keeps
16 getting caught in false statements, he can't be trusted?
17 I don't believe that. I believe these jurors were
18 manipulated by Miss Eazer until they forgot to be triers
19 of fact and acted like social workers. Instead of we
20 believe; they said we care.
21 Probably the most important thing that Mr.
22 Stevens said in his closing was that the jury was to focus
23 on one narrow question: Did I molest M J . The
24 other allegations he said were for another jury in another
25 courtroom on another day. The jury probably thought that

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 38

1 this was pure rhetoric so they disregarded it, but, Your

2 Honor, you know that it is strictly true.
3 As for the assault charges involving J
4 and W W , you yourself already sentenced me for
5 those. As for any allegations involving assault of M
6 J , the state did not choose to file them. As for all
7 the innuendo regarding D L , charges will be
8 prosecuted by another office in front of another court.
9 I realize, as much as everyone else, that
10 the D L case should have been joined with this
11 one. I also understand that it could not be joined with
12 this case because of the perfidious behavior of Deputy
13 County Attorney Eazer. Miss Eazer would rather run the
14 risk of my being murdered in cold blood outside the
15 Prescott courthouse than the risk of possibly losing this
16 case.
17 She would rather put the lives of the
18 officers who have had the unenviable task of conducting me
19 safely in and out of that courthouse at risk. She may
20 even, although we have not had yet had the chance to
21 question Mr. L , have manipulated him with fear of
22 prosecution on the charge of conspiracy to commit first --
23 first degree murder in order to compel his testimony. She
24 certainly interfered in the conduct of the Prescott Valley
25 police investigation.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 39

1 But after all of this, D L will

2 have his day in court, and it was not the jury's duty to
3 fix this. We know all of this, Your Honor, but the jury
4 did not, and so it's understandable that after the
5 emotionally ringing experience to which Miss Eazer
6 subjected them, they abandoned the standard of proof.
7 They stopped asking the obvious questions about Mr. J
8 and they decided to do something to help. It's
9 understandable, but it's not just.
10 Furthermore, we need to ask the question
11 what are we going to fix here today? The jury has made a
12 ruling and you are now expected to hand down an excessive
13 and unreasonable mandated sentence, but first you need to
14 ask what are we going to fix? We are not going to fix
15 M J . I will be the first to acknowledge he is
16 broken. His life-long obsession with inventing new
17 stories and new injustices proves that much.
18 And, Your Honor, I'm not unconcerned about
19 his troubles. I have always wished Mr. J well, and
20 even today, I have tried not to attack him unnecessarily.
21 I have avoided any potential embarrassment to him, and I
22 have only spoken about false statements in the conduct at
23 trial which are pertinent to my case. I still desire a
24 good life for him, but I have to ask and I think you need
25 to ask will his life improve in any measurable way when he

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 40

1 succeeds by way of perjury in ruining another life? I

2 submit that this solution solves nothing.
3 It cannot fix M 's marriage. There's no
4 need to fix his relationship with his children which
5 remains intact, and I, for one, am glad because his
6 children need their father. They are, of course, not the
7 only children who do.
8 Sadly, the sentence cannot fix Mr. J 's
9 toxic relationship with his parents and his brother, and I
10 don't mean to cause any further harm to them but, Your
11 Honor, my life is on the line, and I have to say it. You
12 have heard at trial L J 's testimony of bullying
13 and emotional manipulation which they have suffered at Mr.
14 J 's hands. Do we imagine that's going to improve now?
15 I am, in particular, concerned for M
16 J . No one in the J family is going to believe
17 that I care about their well being, but I was their pastor
18 and I do care. M may think that he has improved
19 things by lying under oath for his brother but he improved
20 nothing.
21 Your Honor, everyone in the courtroom last
22 August knew that M was lying about seeing me with his
23 brother. I knew it because what he described never took
24 place, but everyone else knew it from just watching him.
25 I think Miss Eazer even knew it because she avoided the

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 41

1 topic last summer. It was an invention. I don't know

2 which of the J brothers came up with this invention,
3 but I know what we saw and what I hoped that you saw which
4 was M 's fury over how badly M 's testimony went.
5 M glared at his brother and stormed out of court, and
6 now we have L 's testimony of how M called to blame
7 and berate his family when he did not win.
8 Miss Eazer then tried to rehabilitate the
9 story this spring, only it turns out that M had
10 already told Detective Bernard that he never saw M
11 being abused. So we only gained another degree of
12 certainty that M lied. Does he really think that his
13 bullying little brother is going to be nice now?
14 Instead, M will have to live with the
15 sentence, with the knowledge that my wife is denied a
16 husband and my children a father and he's going to have to
17 wonder whether his false testimony tipped the scale. I do
18 worry about what this sentence will do to him, as should
19 we all. M appears to be an otherwise decent man and
20 he does not need this on his conscience.
21 So what, I ask again, are we fixing? M
22 has indicated, once again, that he wants this never to
23 happen again, and it sounds so honorable, doesn't it? For
24 victims are all honorable men; are they not? But you
25 yourself have found no evidence in the hearing, in which

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 42

1 the state's witnesses testified and mine said nothing, you

2 found no evidence of any present danger. You yourself
3 have said that I had, at least since Prescott, lived an
4 exemplary life.
5 One of the friends who wrote me a letter on
6 my behalf has suffered through a painful divorce and has
7 gone through great sorrow of a disabled daughter, and
8 she's going through it all with my family's help. She has
9 since remarried. Her husband does not know me well, but
10 he knows his own stepchildren. His stepson is one of my
11 son's closest friends. When that man heard the charges
12 against me, he said that they were unbelievable. If
13 anyone, he said, had gotten away with what I was charged
14 with, it would only be worse. There would be a trail of
15 misery behind me and you know, Your Honor, that there was
16 just the opposite.
17 This is precisely why juries are supposed to
18 focus on the narrow task of determining guilt on specific
19 charges. When they try to fix things, they inevitably
20 misfire. This verdict and this sentence will fix nothing.
21 Quite to the contrary.
22 The sentence that you are expected to hand
23 down will only prove destructive. It will destroy a good
24 and loving family. It will make my wife, in her own
25 words, a widow with a living husband. It will force her

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 43

1 to be a single mother while her husband desires with all

2 his heart to contribute and to help. It will deprive my
3 children of their father forever, and you yourself have
4 said that I am a good father. It will deprive my parents
5 who have already been slandered by this unprincipled
6 prosecutor of the aid of their son while their bodies and
7 minds begin to decline, and it will, of course, destroy
8 me.
9 You are expected today to stuff me in a hole
10 to die, and contrary to the expectations of the jury, this
11 will fix nothing. Now, I know the answer. I know that
12 you are supposed to reply that you're not here to fix
13 things but to execute justice but, Your Honor, there is no
14 justice in this verdict.
15 I am concerned for the family that has
16 spoken here today, but I want you also to consider what
17 has been done to me. I have been slandered. I have been
18 lied about by Mr. J , and there is no longer any
19 question that that has happened. I have been hounded by
20 two obsessed and unbalanced persons: Mr. J and Miss
21 Eazer. My reputation has been destroyed. I have lost my
22 career and my livelihood twice, once on arrest and again
23 on conviction, and still, there is no credible evidence
24 that I molested anyone, only the testimony of a man so
25 inconsistent that he would probably invent a new version

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 44

1 of his story if you asked him to tell it again today.

2 This is not justice.
3 I am not a lawyer, sir, and I am not a
4 constitutional scholar but I am, I hope, a constitutional
5 citizen. I take our rights and our duties and this
6 republic very seriously. So I appreciate the comments
7 that you have at times made about our system, particularly
8 about separation and limitation of powers.
9 During the hearing in the fall of 2017 when
10 Miss Eazer tried to convince you to override my doctor's
11 advice -- you remember it's the hearing when she said that
12 I didn't have cancer. And by the way, because this also
13 needs to be said, my oncologist has asked what medical
14 school she attended. In that hearing, you asked a very
15 pertinent question. What constitutional authority, you
16 asked, did Miss Eazer, representing the executive branch,
17 or you, representing the judicial branch, have to
18 intervene between a doctor and her patient.
19 Your Honor, whatever I might have thought
20 about some of your rulings during my initial frustration
21 with this verdict, on calm reflection, it is comments like
22 this that give me hope for our system. With all the
23 respect, which, if it comes too late, is still due to you,
24 I suggest that this is exactly the issue you should be
25 considering today. The constitutional protections that

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 45

1 are put on our rights and particularly the limitation and

2 separation of powers are, I believe, critical in my case.
3 So I would like to ask your indulgence to
4 speak just a little longer about our constitutional system
5 and how our separate and coequal branches of government
6 have to this point failed to secure the rights of due
7 process which you and I are both promised as citizens.
8 The executive branch, as you noted in that
9 2017 hearing, is represented in court by the county
10 attorney's office. The county attorney, by law, is not an
11 advocate for one side but, instead, a minister of justice
12 charged with discovering the truth and securing justice.
13 I have already noted that Deputy County Attorney Eazer is
14 unconcerned with the truth, and without truth, how can
15 there be justice?
16 She is, in fact, the second minister of
17 justice to touch this case. We might one day ask why it
18 was a retired county attorney, not a deputy who shepherded
19 Detective Bernard's non-investigation through the
20 indictment process. We might ask how close his
21 association actually was with presiding Judge Mackey and
22 with the W family whose participation in this case
23 necessitated your presence as a visiting judge. Prescott
24 is a small town, Your Honor, and it is subject to the
25 corruptions that are unique to small towns.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 46

1 Nevertheless, Miss Eazer has had the

2 greatest influence on this case, and her behavior has been
3 unconscionable. She has, as you have observed,
4 personalized this case, bullied the victim, belittled my
5 faith, disrespected the Court, ignored its instructions
6 and violated its rules. And these are not my opinions,
7 Your Honor, they're yours.
8 This opinion is supported by Judge Trebesch
9 who, of course, worked in the courthouse where D
10 L proposed to become an assassin and who actually
11 removed Miss Eazer from the related case. Now, that most
12 egregious violation did not properly come before your
13 court; I understand that, but it confirms a pattern of
14 behavior unbecoming of any officer of the court and
15 entirely unacceptable in a minister of justice.
16 But the most concerning element of Miss
17 Eazer's behavior is this: When you pointed out to her
18 that her actions were unprofessional at best and unethical
19 at worst, she replied that no one ever called her
20 unprofessional before, and that her misdeeds are standard
21 operating procedure in the Yavapai County Attorney's
22 Office. Your Honor, what worries me is this: For once,
23 she's telling the truth. This is how her office operates.
24 I've spent a year inside the jail next door,
25 and I could write a book about the abuses. I don't

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 47

1 suppose that you would or even should allow me to talk

2 about other pending cases, but there is no need. Dennis
3 McGrady, as supervisor in Miss Eazer's office, came to
4 this courthouse, told you that you are wrong about the law
5 and said that he expects his lawyers to violate the rule
6 of exclusion.
7 Your Honor, the executive branch, as
8 represented by the Yavapai County Attorney, particularly
9 Miss Eazer, has utterly failed to preserve our
10 constitutionally guaranteed rights. It has debased our
11 judicial system and turned it into a third world horror.
12 It has not served the constitution of the United States or
13 the people of Arizona.
14 What we believe in and we practice is a
15 separation of powers. So let's turn to the legislative
16 authorities of Arizona. Your Honor, the constant refrain
17 in my camp has been this could only happen in Arizona.
18 The state legislature has, through a series of
19 unparalleled assaults on liberty, so constricted the
20 rights of the accused as to render as defenseless.
21 I note today four unique Arizona practices.
22 First, Arizona has effectively eliminated the statute of
23 limitations. Now, that may not apply to the crimes I
24 stand convicted of today, but it does apply to what I was
25 convicted of last fall, accusations integral to this case

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 48

1 which have impeded my defense. Only Arizona restricts the

2 statute of limitations both to police knowledge and
3 continued residence so that, in effect, no statute at all
4 applies in many cases. Now, why would this be, unless the
5 legislative branch is seeking to overturn the right of due
6 process?
7 Second, Arizona's unique and extreme
8 victim's rights legislation has prohibited my attorneys
9 from questioning key witnesses, severely limiting my
10 right, my constitutional right, to confront my accusers.
11 One of them, D L , only had to stay out of the
12 case to avoid being questioned either on or off the stand,
13 so I had no chance to confront him, and yet, I am
14 convinced that I now stand convicted largely on the basis
15 of his cousin's third-hand account of my interaction with
16 him.
17 Third, Arizona's regressive minimum sentence
18 guidelines are designed to destroy the accused and to
19 intimidate defendants into coerced plea bargains. Every
20 judge, Your Honor, who has ever asked a defendant if his
21 plea was coerced has been forced to participate in an ugly
22 fiction.
23 Now, these guidelines, Your Honor, if you
24 were to follow the current guidelines, if you were not to
25 exercise your discretion under the '95-'96 guidelines,

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 49

1 then you would have no choice but to impose what would

2 amount to a life sentence for unproven charges with scant
3 and unreliable evidence. The legislature has tied your
4 hands, tried to tie your hands, because they fear that you
5 might some day prevent a miscarriage of justice.
6 Fourthly, (sic) Arizona jury rules are
7 designed to keep juries in the dark. It is a violation to
8 not allow juries to know the seriousness of the matters
9 they decide, as was demonstrated by the jury question over
10 which my case agent has fallen afoul of the prosecutor.
11 Juries are left to think happy thoughts about how they are
12 helping people until they read later on in the papers of
13 the lives that they have helped to destroy through
14 unexpectedly long mandated sentences. Your Honor, this is
15 emotional violence against citizen juries, and it is
16 deemed necessary so that they never prevent the
17 miscarriage of justice.
18 Our laws are supposed to lean towards the
19 accused, but in this state they do not. The legislative
20 branch has come up with a system which encourages rogue
21 prosecutorial offices to flourish. It has allowed juries
22 to think that they're doing good when they forget their
23 duty and when they do social work. But worst of all, Your
24 Honor, the legislature has usurped your prerogative to
25 exercise judicial discretion, to apply your knowledge of

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 50

1 this case and your understanding of constitutional law and

2 to do something that is actually just.
3 This then is how the first two branches of
4 our government have served me. They have denied me due
5 process and have violated every rule and every American
6 virtue to secure an unjust conviction in a case with bad
7 evidence.
8 There is speculation in my camp I had the
9 misfortune to live briefly in the only county in America
10 which would even attempt to prosecute this case and in the
11 only state to make their success a possibility, but we are
12 not finished. We have a third branch of government.
13 I stand today before you, the representative
14 of the separate and co-equal branch. You still have the
15 opportunity to say no to the legislature which has
16 curtailed our rights, to say no to the county attorney who
17 has trampled them. You have today the opportunity to put
18 the separation of powers into action and to defend our
19 liberty. Indeed, Your Honor, with all respect, I submit
20 that you must do so, because you also are a minister of
21 justice. You are not merely a tool of the legislature.
22 I understand what the easy course for a
23 judge would be to do. It would be easy to say, well, the
24 jury made its decision. The legislature has prepared a
25 remedy, and all I need to do is announce the predetermined

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 51

1 sentence. But that is not all you need to do because you

2 are here, Your Honor, to uphold and defend our
3 constitutional rights.
4 The very reason that I have a right to a
5 trial by jury is to secure my rights against government
6 misconduct. It's not to absolve you of responsibility to
7 act justly when a jury fails. The reason that we have --
8 that we observe the separation of powers is to place
9 checks on government abuse. It's not to absolve you when
10 that abuse is committed by another branch.
11 When the legislative branch denies due
12 process and when the executive branch abandons ethics,
13 judges must not sigh and say our hands are tied. This is
14 when judges must stand up. This is when the judicial
15 branch must stand in the breach and, Your Honor, you face
16 such a moment today.
17 I am only one man, although my wife, my
18 children, my parents and my sisters stand here with me.
19 My fate might seem like nothing, but society's rights can
20 only be defended by upholding the rights of the solitary
21 and the unimportant citizen. In me, you have before you
22 such a citizen, a lone and defenseless man, asking you
23 what has happened to my rights as an American.
24 The situation in which we find ourselves, in
25 brief, is this: There has been no investigation ever into

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 52

1 the facts of the charges I face. The Yavapai County

2 Attorney has forgotten its function. It has lost its
3 objectivity. It has abandoned its ethics.
4 The only direct witness to these allegations
5 has, by his own admission, made false statements
6 repeatedly under oath in your courtroom and he cannot be
7 relied upon.
8 The jury has abandoned the standard of proof
9 and acted on emotion in the absence of fact. The
10 legislature has allowed all this, has tied your hands and
11 has given you no discretion. It is time, Your Honor, to
12 say no.
13 As I see it, you have two duties to do so.
14 I urge you, first of all, to reconsider your ruling on my
15 Rule 20 motion at the close of trial. You do not need to
16 call into question any of your other rulings but only
17 observe that Mr. J 's manifold falsehoods deprive the
18 state of any chance to make its case. Perhaps you
19 expected the jury to rule correctly on that lone salient
20 fact, but they could not. You can, and I urge you to
21 reverse yourself and to enter a directed verdict of not
22 guilty.
23 Perhaps you have reason not to enter a
24 directed verdict and, if so, I would ask you to reconsider
25 your ruling on my motion to overturn the jury and to grant

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 53

1 a new trial. While less satisfying to me, this would

2 still stand in the breach and it would still say no. And
3 if, Your Honor, my limited knowledge keeps me from seeing
4 how it's to be done, I ask you to find some way to refuse
5 to sentence me and to overturn the grave injustice that is
6 to be done here today. I know what I am asking is not an
7 easy thing for any judge to do, but our liberties can
8 never be secured by doing easy things.
9 My family and I are patriots. My
10 grandfathers were a soldier in World War II, a police
11 officer in Philadelphia. One of my grandfathers and one
12 of my uncles served in the Maryland legislature. My wife
13 and my father-in-law who spoke today carry business cards,
14 as did I before my conviction, for our machine shop in
15 Northern Illinois, cards that are emblazoned with the
16 American flag.
17 Your Honor, we believe in America. We
18 believe in its values. We believe in its constitutional
19 system. We have taught our children to be patriots also,
20 but now, when my oldest son is required to recite the
21 pledge of allegiance in school, he deliberately says with
22 liberty and justice for some. Who's going to stop him?
23 That is precisely what has happened here and he has
24 watched it.
25 Your Honor, we are patriots, but we have to

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 54

1 ask what has America become when rogue prosecutors can

2 indict anyone at all, when a legislative body becomes
3 willingly complicit in unjust convictions, when innocent
4 men are routinely railroaded into prison? Where is
5 America?
6 Your Honor, I'm not asking you to abandon
7 your judicial responsibilities but to embrace them. I am
8 asking you to fulfil the expectations our founders had for
9 you when they established your separate and coequal branch
10 of government. I am asking you to defend your rights as
11 well as mine, your children's, my children's rights and to
12 put a stop to what has become a run-away assembly line
13 that manufactures convictions.
14 I am asking you, Your Honor, to say no to
15 what is actually tyranny. Our system of laws was designed
16 by Englishmen who hated tyranny. Our Republic was founded
17 by a later generation of English colonists who recognized
18 that England herself had, in the case of her colonies,
19 become tyrannical. We, like they, inherited this system
20 but we, like they, must recognize that over time tyranny
21 can grow anywhere. Their fear was that their descendents
22 would fail to stand up; that they might not recognize
23 tyranny when they saw it.
24 Your Honor, this is what tyranny looks like.
25 When a minister of justice is free to ignore all the rules

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 55

1 and to steal the freedom of innocent men and when the

2 legislature is blind towards such abuses, tyranny is at
3 the gates. Now is the time, Your Honor, for a judge to
4 stand up and to say no more before our liberties are
5 further eroded. I am only asking, Your Honor, that you
6 embrace your role, and that today in this courtroom you do
7 what is just and free an innocent man.
8 What I have said today, Your Honor, is the
9 truth. I recognize that I am not required to make this
10 statement under oath, but I am going to do it anyway.
11 Before God, Your Honor, everything I have said here is the
12 truth. So whatever rulings you make or do not make,
13 whatever sentence you see fit to impose, I leave here
14 today secure and confident in my own conscience that I at
15 least have told the truth.
16 THE COURT: All right. I typically don't do
17 this, but given the ad hominem attacks that were made,
18 Miss Eazer, if you wanted to address same, I will afford
19 you the opportunity to do so. If not, that's your choice
20 but I am going to give you the opportunity.
21 MS. EAZER: I do have one brief statement I
22 would like to, make judge.
23 THE COURT: Sure.
24 MS. EAZER: I am not going to defend myself.
25 The defendant can say whatever he wants about me. I kind

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 56

1 of wonder if before Mr. Chantry spoke today, if he had an

2 opportunity to hear about the two letters that were
3 discovered or leaked somehow from ARBCA, the two letters
4 that I provided to this Court that were from 2002, from, I
5 think it was -- it was Ted Tripp and it was either Mike
6 Dukind (phonetic) or Mr. Jansen. Did the Court have an
7 opportunity to look at those?
8 THE COURT: Mr. Jansen and Mr. Tripp.
9 MS. EAZER: Correct, and those letters were
10 written to Earl Blackburn, who, along with Walt Chantry,
11 were the power in ARBCA then, at that time that this -- at
12 the time that these things happened. And what we saw
13 today is exactly what they describe in the letters,
14 exactly what they describe. This is -- this -- in fact,
15 if you looked at the defendant's speech that he prepared,
16 they refer to written pages of, you know, attacks against
17 the elders of the church, and they weren't going to let
18 him manipulate them because they said they recognized it
19 right away as what he does, smoke and mirrors,
20 manipulation, trying to turn the tables and make everybody
21 else the evil villains and make himself the victim.
22 And I think it's -- it's just very
23 appropriate because the Court read in those letters
24 written in 2002 that they regretted what they did. They
25 regretted that they let Walt Chantry and ARBCA bully them.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 57

1 They regretted that they didn't call the police or have a

2 formal council, and in the words of Ted Tripp, he believed
3 had they done the right thing back in 2000, Tom Chantry
4 would have been convicted in a court of law and at that
5 time he said might still be in jail today. And he also
6 expressed his concerns that that -- at that time Tom
7 Chantry was teaching children.
8 I don't know if Mr. Chantry saw those
9 letters or knew that that happened back in 2002. I
10 suspect he did, but I don't know if he knew that an ARBCA
11 member turned them over because they feel so strongly
12 about what's happened here, not to Tom Chantry but to the
13 children and to the families that Tom Chantry destroyed.
14 But this is classic, classic Tom Chantry,
15 and he took advantage of today to give this last sermon
16 for this Court where he criticized each and every party,
17 but he is perfect and that is scarey. It is frightening.
18 As I sat here, I wrote a letter -- I mean a
19 note to the detective, now, I wish I had attached about 50
20 other jail calls. I did not want to give this Court the
21 impression that I was trying to again attack Mr. Chantry's
22 character, but I wanted to attach them because I thought
23 it would show this Court a little bit more of Tom
24 Chantry's true character, because I will tell you, he
25 controls his wife. He makes his kids write scripts before

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 58

1 they talk to him with his wife because he doesn't want to

2 have meaningless discussions with his young children when
3 they don't know how to answer his questions appropriately.
4 There was lots I could have provided but I didn't want to,
5 and in the end, I don't think I needed to, judge, because
6 I think you've seen it here today in this courtroom.
7 The only thing I'd like to say is I
8 apologize to the J family and the W family who had
9 to sit in this courtroom and listen to that rot for the
10 last 45 minutes. Thank you, judge.
11 THE COURT: Mr. Stevens.
12 MR. STEVENS: All right. Judge, may I
13 proceed?
14 THE COURT: Go ahead.
15 MR. STEVENS: Thank you. Judge, the state's
16 rendition of what Mr. Chantry has said was a sermon, I
17 call it an allocution. Allocution is the proper legal
18 term, and I'd like to go back to the law for a minute --
19 not for a minute, for the rest of this proceeding would be
20 nice.
21 This has been a long, long haul for Mr.
22 Chantry, and I understand his allocution can be poorly
23 received, and I don't dispute that depending on who you
24 are, you might find it that way. He knows that. That's
25 why he said in the beginning that he understands he's not

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 59

1 a lawyer and he's probably going to cross some bounds.

2 That said, I just ask the Court to remember
3 this is an allocution of a man who maintains his
4 innocence. This is an allocution of a man who's been
5 indicted going on -- well, for over three years ago, has
6 been through two trials, has another case pending, and for
7 various reasons, good reasons, even reasons based on his
8 own lawyer's advice, has not made statements many times
9 throughout the case; at times, has declined to make
10 statements or testify, I'm sure, even if the Court would
11 have been willing to hear him make statements. So it's a
12 difficult scenario to tell someone you're going to hear
13 horrible things be said about you but don't say a word;
14 don't respond; don't show any emotion.
15 So I just put it in some level of context.
16 It's not going to make anybody feel much better, but I'm
17 not trying to get back to personal feelings or things that
18 Ms. Eazer has said over the years that has upset Mr.
19 Chantry to which he has not responded and things today
20 that Mr. Chantry said that has clearly upset Ms. Eazer. I
21 understand he targeted her and he targeted individuals,
22 but it is his allocution and he has spent a lot of time
23 not speaking, Your Honor. So I hope the Court just
24 remembers that and we can kind of get past that.
25 The state advised they're not seeking to

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 60

1 attack him for his character or I guess the wording was

2 make it look like character assassination, but to be fair,
3 in their memorandum, they wrote the defendant is not a man
4 of good character. They wrote Thomas Chantry is a classic
5 narcissist with anti-personality -- excuse me --
6 antisocial personality disorder. So it sure is a
7 character assassination from someone who's not qualified
8 to diagnose this person, and, of course, he launches back
9 at her and now she back at him.
10 So I want to go back to what we can actually
11 maybe agree on. We do agree on some things. First, there
12 is an aggravating factor the jury found, emotional harm to
13 Mr. J . That's an actual aggravating factor. The jury
14 found it unanimously and the Court should find it today.
15 That's the law. All right. We accept that.
16 There are mitigating factors that I think
17 the state could have identified. They don't have to, but
18 they could have identified in conjunction with their
19 statements as well or the state's presentation as well,
20 and I'd like to identify those as well today.
21 Strong support from his family, the people
22 who have known him, Your Honor, for 16 years, married to
23 Karen for 15 years, and I hope the Court can see, like I
24 do, that Mr. Huber would not stand here and lie to Your
25 Honor to protect Mr. Chantry simply because it's his

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 61

1 son-in-law, and he didn't, and he didn't get up and

2 profess innocence and he didn't get up and tell you not to
3 accept a jury verdict or things of that nature.
4 But he told you what he knows to be true in
5 the last 16 years and that is what he saw, what he
6 observed in his family members, and that is that Mr.
7 Chantry supported his family. He's a good father. There
8 aren't these swirling allegations of complaints over the
9 last 16 years. To the contrary. The state concedes there
10 were no victims that have come forward in 23 years.
11 So where does that leave us? You have the
12 aggravating factor but you have mitigating factors: Mr.
13 Chantry's strong family support, his parenting to his
14 children, his support, meaning financially as well to his
15 family, his gainful employment for years and years and
16 years on end.
17 So the fact that he doesn't stand here and
18 say I want to say I am remorseful so maybe you will find
19 that in mitigation, that would be inconsistent with an
20 allocution designed to maintain innocence. And as the
21 state concedes, that lack of acceptance of guilt or
22 responsibility is never appropriate to be found as an
23 aggravating factor.
24 Your Honor, Mr. Chantry has been respectful
25 throughout the process. He accepted and apologized to the

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 62

1 Court. When we get into jail calls at sentencing, it's

2 rare and I am not going to address it for a long period of
3 time, but after a devastating verdict, Your Honor, being
4 handcuffed before your family, being taken away under at
5 least a realistic belief that it's going to be for a long
6 time, if not the rest of life, that's hard, and that's
7 what Mr. Chantry went through.
8 And I am not portraying him as a victim.
9 I'm explaining to Your Honor certainly if he makes a call
10 to his sister and wants to vent, that's what he's doing.
11 I hope the Court will accept his apologies as sincere
12 because statements made to family after a difficult
13 verdict in a horrific event ought not be the deciding
14 factor as to what are truly aggravating and what are truly
15 mitigating circumstances in a case of this nature.
16 The presentence report, Your Honor,
17 recognized that this risk level assessment does not take
18 into account what hasn't been done essentially. There
19 hasn't been any psychosexual evaluation, things involving
20 a risk assessment, but ultimately he came back as a risk
21 level of low which is not in corroboration of the state's
22 position. Mr. Chantry has been a completely free man for
23 the last 15 years that Mr. Huber's known him, the last
24 15 years that Miss Chantry has been married to him, and in
25 those years, he hasn't committed crimes and he hasn't been

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 63

1 convicted of crimes, but for, of course, the aggravated

2 assault charges that were connected to this case in 1995
3 and 1996.
4 One thing I also want to mention about Mr.
5 Chantry's allocution is don't forget in the second trial,
6 he made the decision to not testify, and we're not
7 disputing Your Honor's ruling, but part of the decision,
8 of course, was that Your Honor had allowed -- would allow
9 the jury to know of his felony convictions and thus know
10 he's a felon from the aggravated assault charges, not --
11 he doesn't have any separate felonies. And so that's a
12 heavy burden to carry, to want to tell your side but to
13 choose not to for good reasons, for valid reasons, for
14 valid, appropriate reasons when considering whether to
15 exercise your right to silence. Nonetheless, it's
16 something that can cause a lot of difficulty in accepting
17 a verdict. It really can.
18 Going back to the presentence report, Your
19 Honor, he has a very strong relationship with his kids.
20 Although the state has alleged in its memorandum that Mr.
21 Chantry demands that others, including his own wife and
22 children, revere him or they will be chastised, shunned
23 and punished, I respectfully submit that's not what Karen
24 Chantry told you today and Karen Chantry has been a
25 respectful participant in observing the trial, supporting

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 64

1 her family. But just like her father, Mr. Huber, they're
2 not people who would stand here and say, you know what,
3 even though we know he did bad things in the last
4 15 years, we're just not going to say them. That's not
5 the type of people they are, judge.
6 So, again, I would like to actually focus on
7 evidence-based factors that the Court should consider.
8 Karen described a positive marriage and Mr. Chantry
9 described a very positive marriage. Often in cases, you
10 see abuse of alcohol or drugs. Mr. Chantry has none.
11 Often in cases, you see mental health diagnosis,
12 medications or history of mental health issues. Mr.
13 Chantry has none.
14 He was employed full time, as verified
15 repeatedly in the letters. Mr. Chantry's attitude,
16 according to the presentence report writer, is positive,
17 positive towards supervision, positive towards any and all
18 terms or conditions and orders of the Court.
19 I would also remind the Court on that issue
20 he was entrusted with a bond. He showed up every single
21 time that he was directed to do so. He participated in
22 his defense every single time he was required to do so.
23 He showed up to two separate jury verdicts, not knowing
24 whether he would be handcuffed.
25 So as a reminder, Mr. Chantry has been

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 65

1 completely compliant with court orders, and I don't

2 believe there's been even a single allegation of even a
3 minor violation, nothing, and he has been out of custody
4 off and on, of course, depending on the proceedings, but
5 off and on throughout the case.
6 Given all that, Your Honor, the presentence
7 report writer had indicated that Mr. Chantry is willing to
8 participate in any levels of counseling that are
9 appropriate, given the type of conviction, maintains
10 positive family relationships and has a good attitude.
11 So, Your Honor, I agree with the Court's
12 assessment of the law in the 1990's. Because of the
13 circumstances factually of this case, it's clear a prison
14 sentence imposed for a conviction of this nature may be
15 served concurrently if the offense involves one victim.
16 Of course, there is another case that can determine
17 whether that sort of issue applies or not. In this case,
18 the only charges brought forth, the only charges of which
19 Mr. Chantry was convicted are the charges that may run
20 concurrent. That would not be the case if this was a sex
21 conduct with a minor conviction or a sexual assault
22 conviction.
23 So with that in mind, Your Honor, we again,
24 agree and recognize that an aggravating factor has been
25 determined and we believe the Court should find it as

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 66

1 well. We also believe that there are substantial

2 mitigating factors contained in the letters and in the
3 other areas that I've already addressed and, Your Honor,
4 we respectfully submit to the Court that a concurrent
5 sentence of a mitigated term below the presumptive is
6 appropriate and would be a sufficient term to serve what
7 really we're here to do and that is punish.
8 Prison isn't going to fix things, as Mr.
9 Chantry indicated. It is certainly not going to lead to
10 substantial levels of counseling or intervention with Mr.
11 Chantry. It may bring peace of mind to victims, for sure,
12 and there's value in that, we concede. Ultimately,
13 however, in terms of the punishment for the actual
14 convictions upon which he stands here convicted, Your
15 Honor, we believe that a concurrent mitigated term is
16 appropriate. Thank you.
17 THE COURT: Thank you. Any legal cause?
18 MR. STEVENS: No. Thank you.
19 THE COURT: Thank you. Before I address
20 mitigating and aggravating circumstances, let me make some
21 observations. First, the defendant is correct when he
22 stated that the sentence won't fix things. Nothing that
23 the Court does today is going to undo the harm to the
24 J family or the W family. Nothing that the Court
25 does today is going to make anything better, whatever

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 67

1 sentence the Court imposes today is shy of the duration,

2 length and weight of the impact upon those affected by the
3 events that occurred. So I agree with that.
4 When the defendant indicated in his
5 allocution that he's the only person that knows the truth,
6 that is inaccurate, because as to their particular events
7 that occurred to them, J , W and M know the
8 truth. When the defendant said that he is alone and
9 defenseless, that is not accurate. He's represented. He
10 is alone in terms of he will be the one that will be
11 serving the sentence, but who actually was alone and
12 defenseless was M J . When M J was
13 being abused by the defendant, he was alone and he was a
14 child and he was defenseless.
15 And he was more alone than he should have
16 been because not only was he alone in that his pastor was
17 abusing him and abused him, but he was alone because no
18 one else was there to support him. So how he, at that
19 time, had to deal with this without the support of those
20 who should have supported him certainly adds to the
21 emotional harm that he has which I'll address that as an
22 aggravating circumstance.
23 There are a number of things I agree with
24 Mr. Chantry in things that he said. Some of them are that
25 the church investigation was poor. The police

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 68

1 investigation was poor. The evidence bared both of those

2 out. The church council was ill-equipped to do this type
3 of investigation. They should have involved the police at
4 that time, as should have others. Unfortunately, that
5 didn't occur. The police investigation that was done was
6 also incomplete and inadequate and the evidence bared that
7 out as well.
8 That the church investigation was poor and
9 the police investigation was poor, however, doesn't
10 diminish what occurred to M .
11 The defendant stated M J is not a
12 man of truth. He has a life-long obsession with making up
13 stories and he's an embittered man willing to say anything
14 to win. I'm not certain that the facts bear that out. I
15 think the facts bear out the contrary.
16 If he was an embittered man willing to do
17 anything to win and has a life-long obsession with making
18 up stories, you know, why isn't he here today? And if
19 you're going to make up a story about someone to get
20 someone in trouble, go all the way. Go for it. Talk
21 about -- I am not going to name them, but talk about other
22 acts that one can allege of a similar genre of acts.
23 If you're going to make up a story and be
24 embittered, make it as empathetic as possible. Make it as
25 horrible as possible so you can get as much sympathy as

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 69

1 possible. That's not what M J did which, in the

2 Court's view, added to his credibility and I believe that
3 is what, in part, the jury saw.
4 When you consider M J 's testimony,
5 it is not unusual when someone's testifying, whether it be
6 2018 or 2019, about events that occurred in the mid
7 nineties to not be a hundred percent accurate on the
8 fringes or the details. The gravamen of what happened was
9 consistent and adds to M J 's credibility from
10 the Court's point of view.
11 M J has been through a lot in his
12 life as a result of his interaction with Mr. Chantry. It
13 has impacted him significantly, greatly. I don't know why
14 he would risk his relationship with his brother, his
15 parents, now his ex-wife, potentially his children simply
16 to get back at Mr. Chantry over not being abused. It just
17 defies common sense, logic and reason.
18 There was also a discussion about M
19 J and referring to him as a bullying little brother or
20 that he's someone that has a troubled relationship with
21 his parents and somehow those are reasons that we should
22 discredit what he said.
23 Well, we have to go a little bit deeper than
24 that, because why did M lash out at his brother
25 and/or his parents? It's because of you. It's because of

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 70

1 what you did. I am not trying to make the J family

2 feel bad. They already do. I am not going to talk about
3 what they should or shouldn't have done. They understand
4 that and they're dealing with it right now and will deal
5 with it perhaps for the rest of their lives.
6 But M has behaved in the way he has
7 behaved not because he's a bad person or a jerk or bad
8 brother or bad son. It's because of you and what you did.
9 I want to stress a couple things because I
10 think sometimes people don't understand this and, that is,
11 that the defendant had a constitutional right to a trial.
12 He has a constitutional right to maintain his innocence,
13 and he has done that, and the Court will respect that and
14 not hold that against him.
15 Therefore, when I hear things, as some of
16 the letters and maybe some of the things people said about
17 repentance, remorse, acceptance of responsibility, I
18 appreciate that's what people want and I understand and
19 respect that, but under the law, I cannot hold against him
20 his lack of remorse and repentance, whatever word you want
21 to use and/or his lack of acceptance of responsibility.
22 Those are things that he had a constitutional right to do,
23 so those won't be held against him, and I want to make
24 that clear.
25 Similarly, something I won't hold against

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 71

1 him is his statement that all prosecutors should be hung

2 and all judges be in prison. I'll take Mr. Stevens in
3 terms of what he said and the timing of what he said, and
4 that was anger and the moment given the circumstances.
5 And it's mentioned in the memorandum, so I feel I need to
6 address it so it is clear that I did not consider that
7 when making my decision.
8 And when I list the mitigating circumstances
9 and aggravating circumstances that I find, understand I
10 find they are present in the case. Just because I find
11 them present doesn't mean I'm giving it significant
12 weight. I'll address what weight I give things at the
13 end.
14 So I find the following mitigating
15 circumstances exist in this case -- before I do that, I
16 apologize, I have another note to myself. This is
17 slightly off topic but related.
18 I think it would be helpful for people
19 moving forward to look into -- at least it's an article.
20 I'm not certain if it was turned into a book by a lawyer
21 and professor of law at, I believe it's, Hamline
22 University in Minnesota and his name is Victor Vieth.
23 He's a devout Lutheran, I believe, in fact, and he wrote a
24 book about religion and -- the relationship of religion
25 and corporal punishment. I think that would be something

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 72

1 that people may want to look into and read for their own
2 edification moving forward.
3 MS. EAZER: Could you repeat the last name
4 again, judge?
5 THE COURT: Vieth, V-I-E-T-H. Spoiler
6 alert. It's not good, not the book, corporal punishment.
7 Moving forward, I find the following
8 mitigating circumstances exist: defendant's educational
9 accomplishments and his intellect. He's certainly an
10 intelligent individual, his stable personal life, the fact
11 that from what I have been presented with, he's been a
12 good father, husband, brother and son. He's employable,
13 has a long work history other than the investigation that
14 led to the indictment. Even though he had multiple
15 trials, he has no criminal history. He has family and
16 community support.
17 I consider his cancer history, his
18 compliance with the Court orders pertaining to release
19 conditions and his age in light of the sentencing
20 structure that we're talking about here as well. I find
21 all those mitigating circumstances exist.
22 I find the following aggravating
23 circumstances exist: the emotional harm to the victim. As
24 I addressed before, again, the jury found that, but it is
25 patently obvious when you saw and observed M J .

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 73

1 That is true.
2 A comment about that. One of the things
3 that struck me during M J 's testimony is that
4 even though we had an adult testifying on the stand, that
5 wasn't an adult testifying. That was -- he was back as a
6 child, talking as a child. I think that was pretty clear
7 and remarkable. So emotional harm to the victim.
8 The defendant took advantage of his position
9 of trust and authority. He used his role as pastor -- he
10 knew that M came from a strict religious family --
11 to convince the child that he deserved the abuse; it was
12 God's will and the child would suffer eternally if he
13 resisted and/or told anyone.
14 The defendant manipulated the victim's
15 parents so that he could be alone with the child. There
16 was not just emotional harm; there was physical harm to
17 the child as M talked about. There were multiple
18 victims, referring to J and W . There were
19 multiple acts of abuse as it applies to M and he
20 devastated multiple families. All of these mitigating
21 circumstances, by the way, so it's clear apply to each
22 count, 2 through 5, equally.
23 I find overall, therefore, that the
24 aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating
25 circumstances to justify an aggravated term of 24 years.

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 74

1 That aggregated term will be imposed as to each count, 2,

2 3, 4 and 5. The counts, however, will run concurrently
3 with each other, in other words, at the same time.
4 The defendant will receive, as we discussed
5 before, 404 days of presentence incarceration credit. The
6 defendant will be required to register as a sex offender.
7 He will have no contact with the victim in this case.
8 He'll have no contact with anyone under the age of 15 with
9 the exception of his own children.
10 I am also imposing the following financial
11 sanctions -- these will apply to Count 2 only -- a
12 one-time $20 probation assessment and a one-time $250 sex
13 offender registration fee. Other assessments that are
14 typically imposed now-a-days were not in existence in
15 1995.
16 If there are any that I missed, let me know,
17 Miss Eazer, in terms of the financial aspects.
18 MS. EAZER: No, Your Honor, I don't believe
19 so.
20 THE COURT: All right. Thank you. I'm also
21 ordering -- this isn't part of the sentence, but I'm
22 ordering separately because I forgot this earlier -- that
23 neither party in this case shall initiate contact with the
24 jurors in this case without prior approval from the Court.
25 This does not, however, prohibit the jurors from

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 75

1 initiating contact with the parties.

2 In addition to the prison term that's
3 imposed, which is, again, a flat day-for-day calendar
4 prison term, the Court is also imposing a consecutive term
5 of what is referred to as community supervision. Some
6 people think of it as parole. In Arizona, we call it
7 community supervision. That term is equal to one-seventh
8 of the prison term imposed and will be served after the
9 defendant is released from prison.
10 Other than addressing the -- one other
11 thing, Miss Eazer, in terms of -- because I didn't see
12 this addressed in anything, and if it is addressed, I
13 apologize. I missed it. I didn't see anything concerning
14 restitution. Do you want to keep restitution open? Do
15 you think there will be a request later?
16 MS. EAZER: If you could, judge. I will
17 tell the Court that M is consider going into
18 counseling. So if I'm successful in getting him to go
19 into counseling, then we would be asking for restitution
20 above and beyond what victim's comp would pay for.
21 THE COURT: Then I will retain jurisdiction
22 over restitution for the duration of the defendant's
23 sentence.
24 Other than the right of direct appeal, is
25 there anything else that we need to address from the

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT
 76

1 state's perspective?
2 MS. EAZER: No, Your Honor.
3 THE COURT: Thank you. From the defense
4 perspective, is there anything we need to address other
5 than the right to direct appeal, sir?
6 MR. STEVENS: One moment, judge. Nothing at
7 this time, Your Honor.
8 THE COURT: All right. Thank you. Sir, you
9 have the right to a direct appeal in this case. You have
10 to file a notice within 20 days of today's date for that.
11 You are entitled to an attorney and transcripts for your
12 appeal as well. If you can't afford them, they will be
13 provided to you at no charge.
14 At this point in time, the defendant is
15 remanded to the custody of the Arizona Department of
16 Corrections and the defendant will have to go over and
17 take care of his paperwork and his fingerprint. Thank
18 you.
19 (Sentencing concluded at 11:22 a.m.)
20
21
22
23
24
25

YAVAPAI COUNTY
SUPERIOR COURT