The Los Gatos mom charged with arranging drunken sex-fueled parties for her teen son and his friends got her answer from a judge Friday on what her sentence would be if she pleaded guilty to charges in the case that rocked her upscale Silicon Valley community: seventeen years and four months behind bars.
That’s a bit shy of the 20-year maximum sentence that prosecutors pushed for but much more than the eight years that Shannon O’Connor was hoping for. Parents of some of O’Connor’s teen victims shared the judge’s proposal with the Bay Area News Group on Friday after being informed by the District Attorney’s office.
Now it’s up to O’Connor, jailed since her bombshell October 2021 arrest, to decide whether to take Judge Elizabeth C. Peterson’s offer or press on with her defense against the charges. She pleaded innocent in the hope that a jury might knock down some of the 39 counts against her.
O’Connor’s lawyer, Brian Madden, had no comment Friday afternoon about the offer. Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office spokesman Sean Webby refused to confirm the judge’s proposal, saying “we will wait until the 16th (of May) when the judge puts her indicated sentence on the record.”
One parent said that she was satisfied with the judge’s offer, which she had expected to be less than the maximum sentence.
“I’d rather it be 19” years, said the parent, who isn’t being named to protect the identity of the juvenile victim. “But it’s better than eight, which is what she’d been asking for, to which we all said, no.”
Another parent expressed concern that the judge’s offer might not be low enough for O’Connor to agree to plead guilty and end the ordeal for her child victim.
“I think the closer it is to the maximum, the less she has to lose by gambling with a jury but also gambling with the lives of our kids,” the parent said. “But it doesn’t deter us from taking the next steps if she doesn’t take it.”
O’Connor, 48, has been jailed without bail since her arrest in Idaho, where her family had moved after years in Los Gatos — home to streaming giant Netflix and countless technology executives, including her estranged second husband, who filed for divorce in January.
She is charged with felony child endangerment and misdemeanors, including sexual battery and child molestation charges that would require her to register as a sex offender if convicted.
Prosecutors say she organized parties for her older son through a prior marriage when he was a Los Gatos High School freshman and ingratiated herself with his friends and social circle, using social media to communicate with the teens, providing them alcohol and a place to party and arranging hookups with underage girls. She allegedly used social media to communicate secretly with the teens without their parents’ knowledge and would help sneak them out at night.
Several of the parties got out of hand, with the teens drunk to the point of vomiting, falling and passing out, with some injuries. O’Connor also is accused of prodding the teen boys and girls into sexual encounters that prosecutors allege weren’t always consensual.
Late last month, O’Conner’s attorney opted for an unusual but not-unheard of proceeding to ask the judge to determine her sentence if she pleaded guilty The defense made the unorthodox move as the case was about to go to a preliminary hearing in which a judge decides whether there is sufficient evidence to warrant a trial. It is typically the defense’s first chance to challenge the evidence.
Judge Peterson granted prosecutors’ request to allow parents and teens to testify in her courtroom last month about the alleged harms from O’Connor’s party schemes before she made her decision. The District Attorney also filed new allegations last month that O’Connor had struck up a jailhouse romance with another woman inmate with whom she was planning a drug dealing operation.Source: www.mercurynews.com