Lamar B. Freeman, a former aide to now-retired Deputy Assembly Speaker Arthur O. Eve, was ordered Wednesday to spend the next 13 years in prison for repeatedly molesting a 6- year-old girl last year and infecting her with an incurable form of herpes. State Supreme Court Justice Timothy J. Drury rejected lastminute pleas for mercy on behalf of Freeman, 54, who has been jailed since he pleaded guilty to reduced charges May 23.
Freeman’s wife, two longtime Eve staff members and a businesswoman made the pleas for leniency.
Drury noted that the prison term “may be a life sentence” for Freeman because he has been treated for lung cancer for the last two years and is in need of a liver transplant. But the judge rebuked him for having “destroyed” his own family and that of his now-7-year-old victim.
“You made an admission that you abused this child,” he told Freeman. “You’ve really hurt this little child by giving her a disease that’s not curable.”
The judge also fined Freeman $1,370 and issued an order of protection, directing Freeman to stay away from his victim and her family until at least May 2028 or face additional prison time.
The mother of the victim told the judge that Freeman, a longtime family friend, had sexually molested her in 1996 when she was 17 and that it so emotionally affected her that she became a drug addict.
The woman told the judge that her daughter will need medication for the rest of her life for the herpes simplex with which Freeman infected her as a result of molesting her in his Buffalo home.
The woman told the judge that while her daughter has returned to school, she still has “anger issues” she takes out on her young brothers.
Freeman had faced a jury trial in May on a charge of predatory sexual assault on a child younger than 13, a relatively new crime carrying a mandatory life term. He asked the judge to grant him probation on his pretrial plea to two criminal charges of a committing a sexual offense in the first degree.
Prosecutors told the judge that Freeman has never expressed remorse in the case, and Freeman told Drury he “was backed into a corner” to plead guilty.
Freeman said that he is “scared to death” about what will happen to him in prison and that other inmates in the Erie County Holding Center have abused him since he was jailed May 23. He unsuccessfully argued for a nonjail sentence so he can “prove myself” on the streets through good works.
William Perks, Freeman’s lawyer, called longtime former Eve aides James Smith and Viola Hill, businesswoman Juanita Salim and Freeman’s wife, Loretta, to speak about his good character. Perks said he will consider whether to appeal the plea and the sentence.
Authorities were alerted to the molestations after the victim was treated in Niagara Falls Medical Center last October, according to Rosanne Eimer Johnson, chief of the Erie County district attorney’s Sexual Assault Bureau, and Assistant State Attorney General Michael McCabe. Johnson and McCabe stressed that Freeman pleaded guilty under a deal that spared him a mandatory sentence of life in prison.
The prosecutors said that Freeman molested the little girl repeatedly when she and her relatives and siblings came to his Buffalo home at various times last year but that the little girl cannot recall the exact dates of the molestations.