Ex-Uber driver, Alaric Spence of North Hollywood, was sentenced on Wednesday January 29th to six years in state prison for raping an intoxicated female passenger in a North Hollywood motel room nearly 18 months ago.
Spence was ordered by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig Richman to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and not to have any contact with the victim for the next ten years.
The victim wrote a statement that was read in court by a Los Angeles Police Department detective, “I’ve tried to process what happened to my body over time. Every night, I cried myself to sleep and used frozen spoons that I kept in my freezer to put on my swollen eyes in the morning. I forgive you, only so I can move on with my life.”
The judge chose the mid-term of six years and outside court afterward, the victim’s mother told City News Service that she was upset by the sentence, saying, “It’s a farce of the court when a victim gets raped and he gets a gimmicky sentence.”
Spence was convicted on November 20th of one count of rape of an intoxicated person, but jurors acquitted him of the two other counts he faced, kidnapping for rape and rape of an unconscious person.
According to Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson, Spence picked up the heavily intoxicated woman in downtown Los Angeles on June 23, 2017, and drove her to a North Hollywood motel, where he raped her. Upon waking up, the woman contacted police.
Police said that Spence had been an Uber driver for six months. He was arrested the day after the attack and has remained behind bars since the day of his arrest.