Lina Sinha, a former Indian-American principal of a New York Montessori school has surrendered to authorities to begin a two-to-seven-year prison term for sex with one of her 13-year-old students,
Lina Sinha, 46, was found guilty of the crime five years ago, but had stayed out of the jail with a wide variety of appeals, according to the New York Daily News. With all her appeals exhausted, her lawyer Jerry Shargel Monday pleaded with Judge Carol Berkman to reconsider her sentence because the charges were “exaggerated.”
“There was a love affair that continued for nine years,” he was quoted as saying. “You heard the victim say (at trial) that he enjoyed the relationship. He found the relationship pleasurable.”
But the judge declined to reconsider her original sentence recalling the victim’s testimony that he was going through a very difficult period at the time of the abuse because his parents were separating.
“She hijacked his life as a child,” the judge said as cited by the Daily News. “The defendant is a woman with every advantage who preyed on the victim for years, and she did try to destroy him.”
The relationship dates back to 1995, when Sinha was a principal at the Montessori International School in Manhattan and she began a romantic affair with one of her 13-year-old students.
It all started when she kissed the then-eighth-grader was upset over an academic competition and the then-29-year-old Sinha kissed him.
‘I was very sad, and Lina kissed me on the mouth,’ the victim told the jury when the trial began in 2007.
The romance proceeded from there, with Sinha performing oral sex on the boy, first having intercourse with him when he turned 15-years-old, and meeting up for trysts in Montessori school vans and having sex on school furniture.Â
In his testimony, the police officer said he was chest-high to Ms. Sinha when their affair began. He said Ms. Sinha had seduced him at a vulnerable time, when he was angry at his mother for divorcing his father. He described how he would take the telephone into his bathroom at home to talk in secret with his principal.
Then they began going on Friday night “dates,†he said. Ms. Sinha, he said, would pick him up in the school van, and they would park on a deserted stretch of York Avenue.
“And there I would kiss Lina and touch her and she would touch me,†he said.
Ms. Chapin, the prosecutor, asked if he remembered his principal telling him to keep their relationship a secret.
“Yes,†the police officer testified. “I recall the substance of the conversation being not to tell anybody. She can get into trouble.â€
According to The New York Times, the affair lasted until 2004, when the young man was 22-years-old and reportedly broke up with his former lover.
She continued to sexually abuse the underage boy throughout his middle school and high school career – and even “manipulated his mind, his body and his judgment for her own sexual purposes,” said Assistant District Attorney Robert Hettleman.
Sinha was convicted of having oral sex with him and another youth, and bribery in April 2007, and sentenced to four to 14 years.