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.
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
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?
It’s the city not the game.
I think that’s the town where it happened.
Ohh I see
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.
Oh gawd I hope this is real…thats <stable>
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?
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
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.
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
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.
Jesus fuck… don’t give them any ideas.
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
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.”
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.
Hot take: banks shouldn’t get rich just from handling other people’s money.
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
An important thing to note is that 50% don’t pay federal tax, as you said here
They still pay sales tax and taxes of that sort (which actually are significant), just not the federal income/property taxes
And that’s not even getting into state income taxes, Medicare taxes, and Social Security taxes. Those all have different brackets and some states are more regressive than others. There are states like Texas that don’t have income taxes, but they make up for it by taxing everything else through things like sales and property taxes.
Of note: sales tax is always the most regressive taxation model, and tariffs are basically sales taxes on steroids.
There are states like Texas that don’t have income taxes, but they make up for it by taxing everything else through things like sales and property taxes
Fun fact: last I checked (~2 years ago) TX was like 8% more taxed than famously tax-happy CA, which pissed some Texan dickheads off when I pointed it out
They just try to slide it under the radar by not showing the taxes on your payslip because you’re more likely to look closer at that than your receipt from the grocery store.
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.
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%.
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.
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
I hear they’re selling 9mm volcanoes like hot cakes. Got yourself some if you’re sanguine about it.
Preach
Do we know if she supports paying for her son’s incarceration?
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.
The title should be whatever response you would make when somebody detonates a nuclear warhead directly inside of your soul.
So oof.
For me, it’s more of the Wilhelm scream.
I will never understand how I can always hear that scream perfectly in my head when its name is mentioned.
Like, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast ten minutes ago.
The show-me state strikes again
Noooot really a shitpost?
Definitely didn’t do that in the hopes that it would mildly annoy someone else as much as OP mildly annoyed me.
If reality keeps upsetting you, maybe reality isn’t the problem.
Reality has a “left bias”.
This is why all conservative subreddits have to curate who can post there because it easily shows that they are really a fringe group that don’t reflect the general population.
Yeah, liberal/left subs definitely don’t do that.
You mean tag users and automatically block comments from users that weren’t approved?
Do you just assume every black person is a leftist? I’m impressed that you’re both racist and stupid!
Hahaha, thank you.
Are you one of those that defines politics as everything they don’t like?
People are allowed to meme about life and shit that’s happened
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.
This women doesnt want to pay for someone elses university degree, she cant have that opinion, lets hang her!
“Hitler doesnt want jews but thats just like, his opinion, nothing wrong with that”
All three people here are terrible
Go ahead, explain, what did the guy answering her question do wrong, exactly?
The question asks why the audience’s student loans should be repaid now when hers were not. The response is that the reason is the same as paying for her son’s prison sentence for raping a minor, which is “betterment of society”. Let’s count the number of ways this fails:
- “For the betterment of society” is a justification that could be used for pretty much any defensible policy decision. It really doesn’t further the argument at all unless there is something specified about how paying student loans makes society better.
- RAPING A MINOR is in caps both to indicate shoutiness and to emphasize this aspect of the crime, which again, is hard to tie back to an argument about student loans
- The main failure - the fact that it’s a blatant ad hominem directed at the poster for having a son who raped a minor, which is an evidently successful attempt to hide the weakness of the purported argument by casting the OP as someone whom one would not want to be associated with by virtue of being a parent to a rapist. This implied argument, which is the real argument, is invalid in the absence of evidence that rapist-parents cannot have valid opinions.
- It’s also a particularly egregious example of an ad hominem because it relies on guilt/worthiness by blood relation, the same concept behind ideas like racism and even worse, inheritance.
Better answers might include:
- Education costs have risen to a degree that the fairness calculation is now different
- Student loan debt is a threat to the whole economy and just as bailing out banks sometimes makes sense, bailing out student loan holders might as well
- Financial inequality is out of control and we should dispense with antiquated notions of “fairness” to the wealthy when circumstances have been more fair to them overall than at any time in the past
But these answers would not get reposted on social media as much because they don’t play into tribalism and social drama.
I’d argue the main part of the argument isn’t the ad hominem. “For the betterment of society” works in this argument and it doesn’t really focuses on the mother, it just makes her realize that this is a real situation that she herself should know personally.
It does address using taxpayer money to lock up violent criminals is beneficial for society and supporting and without going in to depth, it also argues that the idea of student debt repayment would also be a net positive for society.
Sure, it’s not a detailed argument but it’s also not playing on guiltiness by blood relation saying she should be locked up as well.
This implied argument, which is the real argument
Ah, so you’re calling them a terrible person because you misunderstand what’s going on in their reply, gotcha
Assuming you actually believe I misunderstood their argument, perhaps it would be more useful to explain their actual argument that I’m not grasping?
Forgiving student loans is social welfare that will bolster the economy and society collectively.
Her son being a degenerate child rapist burdens society to ensure the safety and security of its populace from his abhorrent ‘need’ to get his dick wet in children.
If anything she should be fighting for more broad societal benefits since she produced and raised such a destructive piece of shit.
So this version of the argument basically amounts to: people who have harmed society should contribute to social welfare that bolsters the economy and society collectively. Which while a solid effort and earning my upvote, 1) the_petty_auntie’s reply doesn’t show signs of making this particular argument and 2) in this particular case, it fails because society as a whole wasn’t harmed by her son’s actions - rather a particular victim was. And as the victim was a teen at the time of the incident, it’s unlikely that the victim would be able to take advantage of student loan forgiveness unless it happened many years ago.
First, I think everyone should want to contribute to social welfare that bolsters the economy and society. I think it’s abhorrent to contribute to that negatively and maliciously, even if indirectly, and then try to further drag everyone down. She’s a cancer.
You think a child being raped only harms the individual that’s raped? Ever heard of seconds and third order effects? I disagree that the only person negatively impacted was the child he raped.
So obtuse
On the contrary it’s right, perhaps even acute
You went to school, got the degree, and accepted the terms of the loans. Welcome to adulthood.
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.
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.
