Sex case lands teacher in prison

First the judge excoriated the former high school teacher for violating a 14-year-old student's trust and sexually assaulting her.

Then Knox County District Judge James Kube shocked the teacher, John L. Hoffman of Bloomfield, Neb., with a lengthy sentence: 18 to 25 years in prison.

That's more than twice as much prison time as a former Lexington, Neb., teacher, Kelsey Peterson, received after having a sexual relationship with a 12-year-old student and fleeing to Mexico with him.

Hoffman, 30, was sentenced Tuesday. He had pleaded no contest to first-degree sexual assault of a child.

He admitted having sexual contact with the student, including intercourse, over several months from October 2008 to April 2009, when he was a math teacher at Bloomfield Junior/Senior High School in northeast Nebraska. State law makes it illegal for anyone 19 or older to have sex with anyone 15 or younger.

Knox County Attorney John Thomas said the sexual contact took place at Hoffman's Bloomfield home, in his pickup and even once at the school.

State Patrol investigators arrested Hoffman in April. When first confronted by school officials, Hoffman denied having sex with the student, saying he was tutoring her in math at his home, Bloomfield Superintendent of Schools Robert Marks said.

But Hoffman later confessed. The school district suspended him and then did not renew his contract, Marks said.

Hoffman apologized multiple times, including in a letter to the judge and in open court, said Hoffman's attorney, Ronald E. Temple of Norfolk.

“He showed incredible remorse, and his counselor concluded that his remorse was genuine,” Temple said Wednesday in an e-mail.

“The probation officer who completed the presentence investigation found Mr. Hoffman to be remorseful and further found that he did not attempt to minimize his actions and, in fact, noted that he accepted full responsibility.”

Hoffman completed sex offender treatment before his sentencing and “did everything that was asked of him by the professionals who were involved in his treatment,” Temple said.

The victim, he said, suggested a sentence of six years.

The judge was not swayed.

Kube reprimanded Hoffman at length Tuesday. Calling teaching a noble profession, Kube said that it created a bond of trust and that Hoffman violated that trust, said Thomas, the prosecutor in the case.

Kube told Hoffman that this wasn't a case of a bad decision or an isolated incident, but a course of conduct over six months, Thomas said. The judge noted that Hoffman was more than twice the student's age.

Fourteen-year-olds may want to do adult things, Kube said in court, but they are children who need to be protected.

Kube told the defendant that society and the law required him, as an adult, to know what the limits are, Thomas said. “The judge made the point that he absolutely did not affix any blame to the child.”

Hoffman could be eligible for parole in nine years.

Temple, his attorney, noted that Peterson, a former sixth-grade teacher, could be eligible for parole in four years, despite a lengthy sexual relationship with a boy who was just 12 when it started.

She was sentenced in April to eight to 10 years in prison after being convicted of two state charges of first-degree sexual assault of a child. (In September 2008, Peterson got six years in prison on a federal charge of crossing state lines with a person younger than 18 to have sex, but she is serving her federal sentence at the same time as her state sentence.)

Temple said he believes that Peterson's and Hoffman's sentences “cannot be reconciled.” He doesn't plan an appeal, though, because Hoffman's sentence is within statutory limits. He had faced a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison.

Kube rejected comparing the two cases, Thomas said.

A State Patrol investigator who worked on the case, Galen Svoboda in Norfolk, took this meaning from the judge when a reporter told him about Hoffman's sentence: “Don't do that in Knox County.”

Contact the writer:

444-1057, christopher.burbach@owh.com