A Berlin man charged nearly seven years ago with sexually assaulting a minor will be heading to prison for at least seven years.
Perry Thompson, 49, was sentenced Thursday in Orange County Superior criminal court in Chelsea to seven to 20 years in prison.
He had pleaded guilty last fall as part of a plea deal to charges of sexual assault on a minor and lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor.
Thompson was arrested in 2015 at the state Agency of Education’s central office, where he worked at the time as an administrative assistant to the agency secretary and to the State Board of Education.
In the sexual assault case, court filings showed that a teenager had come forward in 2015, making the allegations against Thompson to investigators with the Department for Children and Families. Thompson was arrested days later and placed on leave from his job at the Agency of Education. The charges were unrelated to his employment.
The teenager told authorities that Thompson first sexually assaulted him when he was 13 years old and continued over the course of several years, accordng to charging documents.
“According to his own therapist, the defendant sees himself as a ‘knight in shining armor’ who provided affection and guidance that was otherwise missing from (the teenager’s) life,” Orange County State’s Attorney Dickson Corbett wrote in a filing ahead of the sentencing hearing.
“(Thompson) has not been able to identify the inappropriate aspects of his behavior towards (the teenager) and describes the act of sexual assault on a minor as something that ‘wasn’t about my sexual gratification’ but rather something that he did for (the teenager’s) benefit,” Corbett wrote.
The case of lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor involved a different teenager who told police he had met Thompson through an online app, according to court documents.
Under the terms of the plea deal, the prosecutor was able to ask for a sentence of up to 10 to 25 years in prison. His attorney was able to argue for any lesser sentence.
Corbett said Friday that he asked for a sentence of 10 to 25 years to serve, while Thompson’s attorney sought a sentence of two to 15 years in prison.
Judge Timothy Tomasi then imposed the sentence of seven to 20 years in prison.
“I am very pleased for the victims to have a sense of closure and justice following a very long prosecution,” Corbett said Friday. “The reason that both of the victims came forward was to make sure that no other children had to suffer what they endured.”
Thompson was taken into custody following the hearing to begin serving his prison sentence. He was listed Friday as incarcerated at the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield, according to the state Department of Corrections.
Thompson’s case had been working its way through the legal system for years, with several different lawyers representing him over that time.
Thompson went on trial in 2018 and, shortly after that trial began, reached a plea deal.
That plea agreement was later withdrawn when it was determined he had not been made aware that he could have received a life sentence, based on the charge to which he had pleaded guilty, according to attorney David Sleigh. Sleigh did not represent Thompson at that time, but later became his lawyer.
Sleigh said that, after taking the case, he filed a motion to withdraw his client’s plea, which a judge granted.
“Obviously, we were disappointed that the judge gave him more than we thought was necessary,” Sleigh said Friday of Thompson’s sentence, “but it was less than the state wanted and certainly less than he had been facing before we got involved.”
