LANSING — A Lansing man was sent to prison for more than 17 years on Wednesday for raping a teenage girl more than a decade ago .
Ingham County Circuit Judge Jim Jamo declined to set a dramatically longer sentence for Marshawn James Curtis, 30, as prosecutors had asked. He settled on a minimum term at the top of the state sentencing guidelines. He gave Curtis 17½ to 80 years in prison, with credit for the 87 days he’d already served, for first-degree criminal sexual assault.
Jamo said no sentence he could fashion would fix the psychological injuries suffered by Curtis’ victim, who told him she’s spent “a lifetime” trying to recover from the assault.
“I don’t think there’s any minimum sentence I could give that would do anything to change the victim’s life,” the judge said.
The rape case was solved by a regional team working as part of the state’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. The SAKI program was created to investigate and prosecute sexual assaults related to previously untested sexual assault evidence kits.