An Oklahoma man accused of sneaking into a teenage girl’s bedroom in the middle of the night in Battlefield and then raping and assaulting her was sentenced on Friday, Jan. 24 to 20 years in prison.
Patrick Shane Sparkman, 41, entered Alford pleas of guilty to the charges of first-degree rape and first-degree sodomy. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped one count of sodomy, two counts of molestation of a child between the ages of 4 and 17, one count of enticement of a child and one count of third-degree assault.
According to online court records, Greene County Judge Kaiti Greenwade sentenced Sparkman to 10 years for the rape charge and 10 years for the sodomy charge and ordered those sentences be served consecutively.
An Alford plea under Missouri law means a defendant does not admit they committed a crime, but admits prosecuting attorneys have enough evidence against them that a court could reasonably convict them of a crime.
Charging documents described Sparkman as someone who’d been living in Battlefield at the time of the assault on Dec. 31, 2023, but had few ties to the area. He was arrested on March 29, 2024.
According to the probable cause statement used to charge Sparkman, he “claimed he had no memory of the event ever happening. He stated he had been drinking heavily during the day which amounted to what he described was a ‘handle’ of alcohol.”
A handle of liquor is a 1.75 liter bottle of liquor; it has 39 1.5-ounce shots in it.
The victim told police the assault lasted about two hours. She also told police she told Sparkman “no” several times and that Sparkman at one point choked her.
The probable cause statement says the investigating officer contacted the Stillwater, Oklahoma, police department about a “past rape charge” against Sparkman and obtained information that case involved a 10-year-old victim.
Sparkman is from Oklahoma and has no ties to Battlefield, according to court documents.
Sparkman remains in the Greene County Jail awaiting transport to a Missouri Department of Corrections prison.
The probable cause statement says the investigating officer contacted the Stillwater, Oklahoma, police department about a “past rape charge” against Sparkman and obtained information that case involved a 10-year-old victim.
Fuck it. Burn it all down. I think dolphins are next in line. Let’s hope they do better than we did.
EDIT - Goddammit I forgot dolphins are extremely rapey too.
Perpetuating the myth that student loan forgiveness means “your taxes are paying off student loans,” when it really means “government is telling banks to fuck off with their excessive interest rates on student loans.”
Tax money isn’t going to the banks* or the students. The students have usually paid off the loans, and are now struggling with the interest debt. The gov’t telling the bank to give up on that debt isn’t hurting anyone, but the bank doesn’t get as much profit as they could have - and since the banks own the senators & media outlets, we get the myth that student loan forgiveness means “taxes paying off student loans.”
*note - I think some deals do include the gov’t giving the banks some money to “cover their (imaginary) losses.”
Also in the US, the bottom 50% don’t pay a dime in federal income taxes.
Also the concept of “MY” tax dollars is super selfish.
Imma need a source on that. Bottom 50% of who?
The bottom 50% of Americans make less than $40k a year. They do pay some federal taxes, but with the standard deduction, the 19.3% of working Americans that make less than $15k a year don’t pay any federal taxes. The standard deduction goes up to $22.5k for a head of household (i.e. a single working parent). Given that the federal minimum wage still works out to $15,080 a year, that means a full-time minimum wage worker doesn’t make enough to get hit with income taxes.
Edit: Here’s a wikipedia article with the numbers I pulled and the tax bracket info is on the IRS website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
So why did you say it’s 50% when it’s 19.3%? And is that 19.3% of the 50% of americans? Because that would then make it 9.65%.
I just don’t get what you’re getting at here. I make $30,000 a year and definitely still pay federal taxes. Or does, somehow, me getting a tax return mean that I don’t pay taxes? I’m lost.
I didn’t say they paid no taxes at all, but I was explaining how the bottom 50% of earners in the country pay very little, if anything. The 19.3% is the bottom 19.3% of earners in the country, not a percentage of the bottom half.
I would argue that if you get everything (or most of your withheld taxes) back on your return…that means that you effectively didn’t pay federal income taxes or paid very little. If you get most of your withholding back every year, you could look at how you filed your exemptions on your I-9 and increase the number to the maximum allowable. I know some people that put the maximum allowances so that no federal tax is withheld from their paycheck and they just pay the balance at the end of the year when they file their taxes instead of getting a return.
If your tax return equals what was deducted from your pay checks you effectively have not paid taxes, yes.
Their solution is always put it on the consumer. Them prices are to high you need to cut it. Cut it…cut it…cut it. And the downward spiral continues. Straight to the singularity, the butthole of human ignorance.
Hot take: banks shouldn’t get rich just from handling other people’s money.
Then fix the interest rates. Set them to 0% and do a mandatory income based repayment with a subsidy reduction from the graduating institution to incentivize them to help place graduates in better positions. If you hit the institutions with non-placement claw-back fees they will help.
I really wish we would make it a crime to spin narratives in bad faith.
Every public statement by a politician should be considered under oath
…and as such, a shit load of them should be jailed for perjury.
at least here the student loans are given out directly by the state. which means the state sets the interest rate. for the past 10 years, it has been 0%.
Our ancestors worked 16 hours a day 6 days a week. Maybe we should go back to that just to be fair. My grandparents didn’t have the polio vaccine better stop that too.
Common misconception, wrong though. During Industrialisation was the all time peak but today is still much higher than hundreds or thousands of years ago
So the people of the 1800s aren’t my ancestors?
They’re a very small minority.
Way more of my ancestors lived before 1800 than after.
Except, no?
Medieval peasants had SOOO many holidays.
It was a cheap way to keep them from violently revolting. Even then, it didn’t always work.
Speaking of violent revolt against an oppressive system, where are we at?
Medieval peasants had SOOO many holidays.
Holidays meant “you don’t have to work for the lord who owns your land”, but since they were subsistence farmers in the middle ages, that meant they still had to tend the animals and do the work on their own plots. They were absolutely still working during their “holidays”.
It is not the work but the pay…and the lord is always in the way.
Why does everyone think “ancestors” means medieval? The people I never met in the 1800s are ancestors too. So “Um ahkchually” right back at ya
Speaking of violent revolt against an oppressive system, where are we at?
You shouldn’t kiss and tell
“In the Middle Ages, people actually had more leisure time and more holidays than we do,” cultural historian Witold Rybczynski tells ABC RN’s Life Matters.
“Leisure was more important in terms of everyday life than the work. The work was harder and broken up much more … compared to today.”
Yes yes yes… You give these fat cat bastards an inch and they’ll take a mile. Efficiency is not for me. It’s for the money man. Also, what type of efficiency are we talking about here?
Unfortunately, the last panel isn’t happening in real life
Maybe they meant the 1800s?
No
Jesus fuck… don’t give them any ideas.
To be honest, that’s exactly what many “conservatives” today want. They would be better described as reactionaries than conservatives.
Regressive is the term you’re searching for.
We’ll all become peasants who serve a lord and we’ll call it natural living
CEOs, “Sounds wonderful. Lets!”
They would be delighted about the lack of vaccines
I know this is not the point, of the post, but what the hell do they mean by calling the raped teen a Battlefield teen? Was she a pro gamer?
I think that’s the town where it happened.
Ohh I see, thanks
Battlefield is named for its proximity to the 1861 Battle of Wilson’s Creek, one of the first large battles of the American Civil War.
It would not have occurred to me that you’d call a town that.
It’s the city not the game.
You know what? I’m convinced. If the mother of a rapist pedo doesn’t want to forgive student loans, she’s probably right about government policy. In fact, she should run for office. /s
Run for office? Are you out of your goddamned mind?! We can’t have a woman president! /s
can we yeet all these individualistic, self-righteous fucks into a volcano already?
I’m so tired of having to convince these unempathetic, short-sighted dregs that caring about your fellow human is actually a good thing, and, y’know, kinda the whole basis to having a functioning civilization
Preach
I hear they’re selling 9mm volcanoes like hot cakes. Got yourself some if you’re sanguine about it.
Because “f u, I got mine” (and the other side of the coin too: “if I got fugged, so will you”) is the one true creed in American society, and everyone that opposes it is a heretic/commie.
Hooray for me and fuck you!
Meshes nicely with their preference to socialize the losses (if I got screwed, gimme your tax money) and capitalize the gains (just gimme all your money) that they prefer in their kleptocratic or coporatocratic government style.
Oh gawd I hope this is real…thats <stable>
Oof is not really the appropriate title.
The title should be whatever response you would make when somebody detonates a nuclear warhead directly inside of your soul.
If I was her, I would put my phone down and walk outside of my house into the woods and never return.
Do we know if she supports paying for her son’s incarceration?
Noooot really a shitpost?
one person’s shit post is another’s shitpost
Allow me to shit-respond.
Everything is a shitpost on the internet.
Lemmy LOVES this ragebait shit
Lemmy is not some homogeneous hive-mind.
The show-me state strikes again
You went to school, got the degree, and accepted the terms of the loans. Welcome to adulthood.
Ah yes, the I suffered so should you argument
No it is more an argument of responsibility. Many students didn’t go to college because they researched how much it costs, the terms of the loans, and made the decision they could not afford it. These are the people being cheated and I don’t support that.
What happens if your school loses accreditation or you get kicked out for protesting in the wrong way?
What happens if your school loses accreditation
Ooo ooo I know this one! That’s when you get a letter in the mail saying the feds have taken over your loan, the month payments start being due, and literally no other information. And then you call them and ask where to send payments and they say to send it wherever you had been sending it, seemingly missing the part where they just took over the loan. And then life happens and you realize you haven’t made payments. So you call and get the same runaround. And then you call later and give them an address update when you move, ask them about paying, and get treated like you have three heads. And then a few years later you get a very angry letter that the loan is in default. So you call and explain, and the person on the other end treats you like human filth, barely stopping short of using obscenities. So you hang up to let your anger simmer down, call back, and speak with “a manager.” Explain the whole thing top to bottom. That’s when you find out that when they took over your loan seven years ago, they immediately put it into the delinquent bin even though it was quite fresh at the time. And everyone you’ve talked to since just assumed you were a deadbeat.
Then you pay off the loan total using a credit card (because it’s thousands of dollars and you’re broke) and pay the interest again.
Thank you for expanding on that, sorry you had to go through that even if it was a lifetime ago. Just trying to remind OP that part of adulthood is getting screwed by circumstances beyond your control, regardless of signing things and agreeing to terms.
Well that was a depressing read
If it makes you feel any better, this all happened 20+ years ago.
You’re missing the part where, because of federal interest in schooling loans (because the government wants a well-educated population, typically), you have a captive market with colluding loan companies that abuse said federal interest to jack up education prices and interest rates. In other words, you don’t have an option but to accept the ‘terms’ of the predatory loans unless you don’t go to college… except the federal government wants you to go to college.
So student loan forgiveness is basically the federal government yanking the collusion back and going “no, they pay off the loan and a REASONABLE AMOUNT OF DEBT, and the rest of the absurdity you’re trying to shovel gets canceled because it should have never been tried in the first place.”
And then conservatives whine and cry about their tax money going to 'paying off student loans" because conservatives are idiots that can’t comprehend why a rich person would lie to them.
Your education has nothing to do with societal expectations, political parties, or the evils of capitalism. You made a choice, gave your word, and entered into an agreement. Honor your agreement.
The point is that you DIDN’T make a choice, because you were colluded against. Why so much focus on honoring your agreement, when they aren’t honoring their agreements?
All three people here are terrible
deleted by creator
I’m not saying you’re wrong, because it could very well be the case, but it doesn’t mention in the post that he is her husband-son.
