A woman who was raped as a teenager is celebrating the removal of the judge who overturned her rapist’s conviction – but the magistrate said he still stands on his decision.
Cameron “Cammy” Vaughan, 18, was relieved when the scathing 33-page ruling that stripped Adams County Judge Robert Adrian of his right to rule was handed down Friday by the Illinois Courts Commission.
“I cried. I cried so much,” she told NBC News. “I was just — it was unbelievable.”
“He changed my life, and nothing happened to him. He needs to see what he did to me, how he made me feel and know that I’m the reason you’re not a judge anymore.”
Two years prior, Adrian sparked outrage after overturning Vaughan’s rapist Drew Clinton’s sexual assault conviction, saying he didn’t believe the boy was guilty.
Clinton had been convicted of raping Vaughan at a May 2021 graduation party in Quincy, where the then-teenager claimed she woke up to a pillow being pushed into her face and felt Clinton assaulting her.
Clinton, who was 18 at the time of the crime, maintains his innocence.
Adrian originally found the young man guilty of one felony count of sexual assault in October 2021, but he later reversed the decision in early 2022 and allowed the convicted rapist to walk free, saying it was “not just” to send him to jail and that his five months in county jail was “plenty of punishment.”
The disgraced judge still stands by that decision today, saying: “Why would I want to send a person who’s not guilty to the Department of Correction? Of course, I’ll reverse. There’s a lot of judges that wouldn’t. They’d wait and say, ‘Oh, well, if I made the mistake, the appellate court [will] straighten it out.’”
Adrian said he stood by the controversial decision because he felt the prosecutors had failed to prove their case and it wouldn’t be fair for Clinton to rot in prison.
“See, that’s what nobody wants to do, nobody wants to actually look at the evidence in the case,” he told NBC News. “[Clinton] was not guilty.
“I made a mistake, and I corrected the mistake. So now, you know, you want to chastise me for correcting my mistake, go ahead. But I can’t help but people are human. We make mistakes. I correct mine,” he lamented.
However, the Courts Commission doesn’t agree with his rationale, blasting the judge by saying he “intentionally subverted the law and then lied about it under oath to serve his own interests.”
“We have already concluded that respondent reversed his guilty finding to circumvent the law,” the report read. “Nor do we accept respondent’s contention that he made a mistake in finding Clinton guilty.”
Since the stripping of Adrian’s judicial robes, Vaughn said her faith in the system has been restored.
