By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

WILMINGTON, N.C. – In 2009, Wilmington high school teacher Leah Shipman was arrested and charged with statutory rape and taking indecent liberties with a child for allegedly having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student.

By January of 2011 she was facing a possible 15-year prison sentence for her misdeeds, but she found a way out of it – she divorced her husband of 19 years and married the boy she allegedly molested.

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The student, who was 17 at the time, needed a permission note from his mother to marry Shipman, who was 40. Perhaps the mother was satisfied with the unusual education he received at Brunswick County Academy.

The wedding was a legal miracle for Shipman. Under North Carolina law, a defendant’s spouse cannot be compelled to testify against the defendant in criminal proceedings. That made all of the victim’s previous statements implicating Shipman legally inadmissible.

Charges against the teacher were dropped when officials learned of the marriage. The good news is that she was fired from her job at the school and forced to surrender her teaching certificate.

Now perhaps her new hubby can relax a bit, knowing she won’t have the opportunity to do to others what she did to him just a few short years ago. And parents in other districts can relax, knowing she can’t resurface in their schools to prey on their naive children.