A teenager who was human trafficked and initially charged with first-degree murder after stabbing her accused rapist, was ordered to pay the man's family $150,000 in restitution on Tuesday.
Peiper Lewis, 17, of Iowa, was also sentenced to five years of closely supervised probation for the June 2020 killing of 37-year-old Zachary Brooks. Lewis had pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and willful injury last year, NBC News reported.
The charges brought against Lewis could have resulted in 10 years in prison for each, but Polk County District Judge David M. Porter deferred them on Tuesday. Now, if she violates any portion of her probation, she could serve a 20-year prison term, the New York Post reported.
Porter noted in his sentencing that restitution is mandatory under Iowa law and that "this court is presented with no other option," meaning she will have to pay the estate of her alleged rapist.
Officials had shared that Lewis, who was a runaway escaping her abusive adoptive mother, was sleeping in the hallways of a Des Moines apartment building when a 28-year-old man took her in and forcibly trafficked her to other men for sex, CBS News reported.
Lewis, who was 15 at the time, was trafficked to Brooks, who had reportedly raped her multiple times the week before his death. Some of the encounters were allegedly at knifepoint by the 28-year-old man who forced her to go to Brooks' apartment.
The last encounter resulted in Lewis stabbing Brooks more than 30 times after she grabbed a knife from a bedside table, according to her report to officials.
Police and prosecutors did not dispute Lewis' abuse and trafficking, but they did argue that Brooks was sleeping when he was stabbed, making him not an immediate danger to Lewis.
Some states have safe harbor laws that grant some level of criminal immunity to victims of human trafficking, but Iowa is not one of those states.
Affirmative defense laws give leeway to victims of crime if the victim committed the violation while "under compulsion by another's threat of serious injury, provided that the defendant reasonably believed that such injury was imminent."
However, since she pleaded guilty to the two charges, prosecutors argued Tuesday that she waived that affirmative defense.
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