GREENFIELD — A 20-year-old man was sentenced to four years in the Franklin County Jail and House of Correction after pleading guilty on Wednesday to 12 counts of child rape.
Jakob Malcolm-O’Malley of Orange appeared in Franklin County Superior Court to change his plea. He was ordered to undergo sex offender counseling, have no contact with the victim and have no unsupervised contact with anyone under the age of 16.
Malcolm-O’Malley was being held on $50,000 bail after originally pleading not guilty in Orange District Court. The case was transferred to Franklin County Superior Court due to its severity. He will receive 664 days of credit for the time he was incarcerated.
According to Assistant District Attorney Thomas Robinson, the Orange Police Department received a call on Jan. 19, 2024, from a woman who found her 14-year-old daughter in bed with Malcolm-O’Malley, who was 19 at the time.
The prosecutor said the defendant and the victim met through the multimedia messaging app Snapchat and engaged in “a series of sexual acts” over the course of two nights. Robinson also stressed to Judge David Hodge the two participants’ age difference.
“We take that very seriously,” he said.
Robinson mentioned that Malcolm-O’Malley, who initially lied to police about his age, was familiar to law enforcement, having been a juvenile defendant in the past.
Defense attorney Dan Solomon mentioned the “utter absence” of force or coercion on his client’s part. Saying that Malcolm-O’Malley is “in the top tier of intelligence,” Solomon stressed the importance of his client serving his sentence at the local facility, arguing that someone like him would “be swallowed up in state prison and come out worse.”